Numpy has some very useful string operations, which vectorize the usual Python string operations.

Compared to these operation and to pandas.str, the numpy strings module seems to be missing a very important one: the ability to slice each string in the array. For example,

a = numpy.array(['hello', 'how', 'are', 'you'])
numpy.char.sliceStr(a, slice(1, 3))
>>> numpy.array(['el', 'ow', 're' 'ou'])

Am I missing some obvious method in the module with this functionality? Otherwise, is there a fast vectorized way to achieve this?