title: Selecting characters in string numpy array (Python)
body: <p>I have a numpy.ndarray of strings like that</p>
  
  <pre><code>HHMM = ['0000' '0001' '0002' '0003' '0004' '0005' '0006' '0007' '0008' '0009' ...]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here the first two elements are the hour and the last two the minute. In order to convert to time format (using datetime), I want to separate this characters.</p>
  
  <p>I tried doing </p>
  
  <pre><code>hour   = HHMM[::][0:2]
  minute = HHMM[::][2:4]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but the result is this</p>
  
  <pre><code>print hour
  ['0000' '0001']
  
  print minute
  ['0002' '0003']
  </code></pre>