repr for string item within array of dtype object is missing quotes (Trac #1361)

[thouis]

Original ticket http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1361 on 2010-01-13 by @yarikoptic, assigned to unknown.

In numpy version shipped with Debian

$> python -c "from numpy import *; print __version__; r=repr(array(['s', None])); print r; eval(r)"
1.3.0
array([s, None], dtype=object)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 's' is not defined

as well as current trunk

$> python -c "from numpy import *; print __version__; r=repr(array(['s', None])); print r; eval(r)"
1.5.0.dev
array([s, None], dtype=object)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 's' is not defined

[numpy-gitbot]

@charris wrote on 2010-01-14

I suspect this is related to the fact that repr on arrays calls str on the elements rather than repr.

[numpy-gitbot]

@charris wrote on 2010-01-14

Oops, looks like repr is called on the arguments. Hmm...

[numpy-gitbot]

@yarikoptic wrote on 2012-07-23

HA -- apparently I have complained about this already ... quite some time ago and now I ran into it while reporting #641

so it would be nice if someone had a look at this ancient issue

[supermank17]

Huh, results are different if None is passed in than if another value is passed in.
For example, r=repr(array(['s', 5])); print r; eval(r) gives the expected output.

[seberg]

supermank17, that is because the resulting type of the array is string and not object in your example, which has different code for printing.

In any case, this behaviour is fixed starting with 1.7. so that it actually does use repr for object arrays and the examples here work. So I am closing it.