As previous posts have pointed out, Numpy's `S` type is currently treated as a byte string, which leads to more complicated code in python3. OTOH, the unicode type is stored as UCS4, which consumes a lot of space, especially for ascii strings. This note proposes to adapt the currently existing 'a' type letter, currently aliased to 'S', as a new fixed encoding dtype. Python 3.3 introduced two one byte internal representations for unicode strings, ascii and latin1. Ascii has the advantage that it is a subset of UTF-8, whereas latin1 has a few more symbols. Another possibility is to just make it an UTF-8 encoding, but I think this would involve more overhead as Python would need to determine the maximum character size. These are just preliminary thoughts, comments are welcome.
Chuck
_______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
