filling and printing numpy arrays of str

[pjfarley3]

I am new to python but experienced in several other languages. I do not understand yet why numpy.full does not fill an array of strings with the string value I supply in the code.

Example code and output follows. OS is Win10-64 Pro, Python version is 3.8.3.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import numpy as np

class arstr:
    def __init__(self, asize, aval):
        self.strs = np.full([asize, asize, asize], aval, dtype=str)

Mystrs = arstr(3, " ? ")

for s in Mystrs.strs:
    print (s)

exit()

Output in a cmd.exe window follows.

Output:
C:\Testdir>python atest.py
[[' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']]
[[' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']]
[[' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']
 [' ' ' ' ' ']]

Why are each of the array elements a single blank character and not the three-character string " ? " that I specified in the invocation of the class?

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

Peter