title: Testing numpy arrays of characters for equality
body: <p>I tried to use numpy.equal on chararrays but I keep getting the future warning error. I reduced it to compare an array with itself and it still pops up.
  What am I doing wrong? Is this operation not allowed on this type of array?</p>
  
  <pre><code>a=np.chararray((1,4,3),itemsize=2)
  a.fill('a')
  np.equal (a,a)
  </code></pre>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>FutureWarning: elementwise comparison failed; returning scalar instead, but in the future will perform the elementwise comparison</p>
  </blockquote>