This is documentation for an old release of NumPy (version 1.3.). Read this page in the documentation of the latest stable release (version > 1.17).
A character array of string or unicode type.
The array items will be itemsize characters long.
Create the array using buffer (with offset and strides) if it is not None. If buffer is None, then construct a new array with strides in Fortran order if len(shape) >=2 and order is ‘Fortran’ (otherwise the strides will be in ‘C’ order).