Original ticket http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/298 on 2006-09-28 by trac user ericjones, assigned to unknown.

I've been using the new record arrays and lexsort from numpy quite a lot lately. Very cool stuff.

Using the nightly egg for numpy from here (I believe it is up to date...):

http://code.enthought.com/enstaller/eggs/numpy-nightly-py2.4-win32.egg

I get segfaults when using lexsort on character arrays. A lot of my columns in record arrays are string based, so sorting the arrays based on these columns would be really handy.

Here is an example that crashes for me.

C:\wrk\mt\trunk\src\lib\mt\statement\tests>python
Python 2.4.3 - Enthought Edition 1.0.0 (#553, Aug 2 2006, 12:09:59) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

from numpy import lexsort
lst = [1,2,3]
lexsort((lst,))
array([0, 1, 2])
lst = ['abc','cde','fgh']
lexsort((lst,))

thanks,
eric