[Numpy-discussion] Why stripping spaces in strings?

[Francesc Alted]

Hi,

A user of pytables recently asked me why it truncates the trailing spaces on
strings. I have to explain him that the information is there, but the
strings module of the numarray package deliberately strips off the trailing
spaces when printing:

>>> from numarray import strings
>>> a=strings.array("hello world  ")
>>> print a
['hello world']
>>> print "<%s>" % a
<['hello world']>
>>> len(a[0])
11

however:

>>> print "<%s>" % a._data
<hello world  >
>>> a._byteView()
array([[104, 101, 108, 108, 111,  32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100,  32,  32]], 
type=UInt8)
>>> a._itemsize
13

In the beginning I thought that this was a nice feature, but when people is
using numarray.strings objects as containers (for example for Pickled
objects), that can be rather confusing, and I would prefer to see all the
trailing blanks.

But as I am not completely sure, I just would like to discuss the pro's and
con's of the current printing apprach.

Cheers,

-- 
Francesc Alted