I'd like to make the following change to the chararray constructor. This is motivated by some of chararray's methods constructing new chararrays with NumPy integer arguments to itemsize, and it just seemed easier to fix this in the constructor. Index: numpy/numpy/core/defchararray.py =================================================================== --- numpy/numpy/core/defchararray.py (revision 5378) +++ numpy/numpy/core/defchararray.py (working copy) @@ -25,6 +25,11 @@ else: dtype = string_ + # force itemsize to be a Python long, since using Numpy integer + # types results in itemsize.itemsize being used as the size of + # strings in the new array. + itemsize = long(itemsize) + _globalvar = 1 if buffer is None: self = ndarray.__new__(subtype, shape, (dtype, itemsize),