Is access axis categories possible and if so, how?

[meliache]

For my personal use-case I created some helper functions to convert histogram axes to pandas IntervalIndex to help me with creating pandas Series from histograms. It would be nice to use the categories as an Index for category axes. For IntCategory I can obtain them from the mapping, but I don't know whether the category strings for StrCategory axes are public or the mapping of integers to strings is private and impossible to access. Tab-completion and dir didn't show me any method or attribute to access the strings. It's not super important, I can always re-index manually as I know the categories, but would be a nice-to-have.

Just in case someone is interested, below is my hist axis to index and histogram to pd.Series helper code from my personal analysis utils.

def to_tuples(hist_axis: AxisProtocol) -> List[Tuple[float, float]]:
    """Take a hist axis and return a list of bin range tuples each with a lower and upper bin edge."""
    edges = hist_axis.edges
    return list(zip_longest(edges[:-1], edges[1:]))

def to_pd_index(hist_axis: AxisProtocol) -> pd.IntervalIndex:
    """Take a hist axis and return a pandas index"""
    # TODO: would be nice to just use the categories for category axes 
    return pd.IntervalIndex.from_tuples(to_tuples(hist_axis))

def to_uncertain_values(histogram: hist.Hist) -> pd.Series:
    if len(histogram.axes) > 1:
        raise ValueError("Only 1D histograms are supported.")
    uncertain_array: npt.NDArray[Any] = np.array(
        unc.correlated_values(
            histogram.values(),
            covariance_mat=np.diag(histogram.variances()),
            tags=["histogram statistics"] * len(histogram.axes[0]),
        )
    )
    return pd.Series(
        uncertain_array,
        index=to_pd_index(histogram.axes[0]),
    )