Description
The following example demonstrates an issue when comparing a string column with a bytes column:
In [64]: t1 = Table(masked=True)
In [65]: t1['a'] = ['a', 'b', 'c']
In [66]: t2 = Table(masked=True)
In [67]: t2['a'] = [b'a', b'b', b'c']
In [68]: t1['a'] == t2['a']
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-68-372e9d1afaab> in <module>()
----> 1 t1['a'] == t2['a']
~/Dropbox/Code/Astropy/astropy/astropy/table/column.py in _compare(self, other)
938 if self.dtype.char == 'S':
939 other = self._encode_str(other)
--> 940 return getattr(self.data, oper)(other)
941 return _compare
942
~/miniconda3/envs/dev/lib/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/ma/core.py in __eq__(self, other)
3909 else:
3910 odata = filled(other, 0)
-> 3911 check = self.filled(0).__eq__(odata).view(type(self))
3912 if self._mask is nomask:
3913 check._mask = omask
AttributeError: 'NotImplementedType' object has no attribute 'view'
In [69]: t2['a'] == t1['a']
Out[69]:
masked_array(data = [True True True],
mask = [False False False],
fill_value = True)The expected result is that t1['a'] == t2['a'] should be equal to t2['a'] == t1['a']
cc @taldcroft @mhvk