[SciPy-dev] chararray docstrings

[Ralf Gommers]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Perry Greenfield <perry at stsci.edu> wrote:

>
> On Oct 12, 2009, at 1:09 PM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> >
> >
> > It would still be nice to have a slightly longer (tutorial-style)
> > discussion somewhere in the docs. Or otherwise maybe a link to FITS
> > docs that are illustrative? I still have a hard time understanding
> > why operating on astronomical images with Python string methods is a
> > good idea.
>
> The short answer is that the FITS package deals with reading table
> data as well (which is used for all sorts of things like sky target
> lists or other catalog-like information). Such tables often have
> fields with string content (e.g., target name). It is common to select
> rows based on the content of these character fields. These tables can
> have tens of thousands of rows so efficiency is an issue.
>
> Thanks, that makes sense.

Ralf


> Perry
>
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