BUG: long str unconvert fix 
When storing long strings in hdf5, they get truncated at 64bytes when converted back to strings. The fix computes the itemsize of the strings and uses it before converting to strings. It would be possible to use the attribute information of the table, but that would require changes in the calling code.

Test that failed without the patch is included.

this was a fixed bug in numpy 1.7.2
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/2485
 needs a perf check

iirc this was an odd bottleneck

course it only matters if the data is encoded
 I did an update on numpy and it fixed the issue. If you think the I should pref check the patch for numpy <= 1.7.1, I could do this, otherwise you can close the pr
 no...I like this PR!

I don't think its actually an issue (the issue is in decoding strings, which is why I used this method in the first place which is quite fast). True you have to figure out the max length of the string...

tell you what...why don't you put a conditional based on numpy <= 1.7.1 and then do your way, otherwise leave it? (use LooseVersion)
 I did the perf test, nothing changed significantly, and also implemented the check for the numpy version 
 Did the changes and added release notes.
 This change is actually very tricky and subtle because of exactly 3.3 / 2.7 interact with encodings....

still failing on 3.2 on 1.7.1.....

https://github.com/jreback/pandas/commit/6c268de1be38a239e9a114aaf1723a85e44146f2

I am not sure how to specify a dtype on 3.2 like 'S100'....maybe you can figure this out?
its essentially a unicode dtype
 what about `np.dtype((str,itemsize))`? Results in '<U{size}' for python 3 and '|S{size}' for python 2, which seems to be ok?
 do u have the ability to try in py3.3 on windows
that was the one throwing the error originally (weird but not on Linux)

u can use the just released 3.1 and try modifying the source 
as compiling in windows is a bit tricky

if u want to try compiling on windows I can help though
 can't help with this, have no windows machine around.
 ok no problem
pls update with the encoding tests and your change and I'll give a whirl in a couple of days
 I did a PR on your branch with some fixes to make this work on windows: https://github.com/wabu/pandas/pull/1
 @wabu pls incorporate my changes when u can
 @wabu can you incoporate the changes and rebase?
 closing in favor of #6821
