Cannot write to string `dtype` stores about tensorstore HOT 2 CLOSED

NumPy itself does not support a proper variable-length string type. The "|S" dtype is a fixed-length string data type, where the length is <N>. If you store a shorter string, it will be zero-padded up to that length.

In TensorStore, the zarr |S<N> dtype is treated as an array of characters (bytes), where there is an extra dimension (after the dimensions given by shape) that corresponds to the string length. However, there appears to be a bug in the Python API handling of this character data type. We will need to fix that.

Separately, zarr does have a way of encoding variable-length strings, via the vlen-utf8 and vlen-bytes filters, but those still need to be implemented in TensorStore; they haven't previously been requested.

from tensorstore.

OK thanks! Fixed length string/byte/etc arrays are totally fine, just need to get that working 😅

from tensorstore.