Sorry for top-posting--blame apple.
Hm my first instinct was indeed to make it a zero-length array. I was
thinking of the input as a "list" and surely there are no elements in
a list which empty. I had to think a while until a length-1 array made
sense.
I suppose the thinking was string_to_array is the inverse of an
array_to_string operation then there are multiple possible answers.
You might have joined a zero length or a singleton array of an empty
string....
and since it's unknown which was the original value null is the right
answer...
I agree that picking an arbitrary choice is going to be more useful in
practice though.
--
Greg
On 30 Mar 2009, at 23:26, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Steve Crawford <scrawford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I have a query that converts a string to an array with the
string_to_array function. Sometimes the input is an empty string
(not a
null, but a string of zero-length). I had expected the result to be a
one-element array with an empty string as the first and only
element but
instead it returned null. I looked at the docs and didn't find the
observed behavior documented.
The behavior is pretty intentional according to the source code:
/* return NULL for empty input string */
if (inputstring_len < 1)
{
text_position_cleanup(&state);
PG_RETURN_NULL();
}
I agree this seems less than consistent though, especially seeing
that you *don't* get a null for a zero-length separator, which if
anything is a more poorly defined case.
I doubt it'd be a good idea to back-patch a change for this,
but I could see altering the definition for 8.4.
Does anyone want to argue for keeping it the same? Or perhaps
argue that a zero-element array is a more sensible result than
a one-element array with one empty string? (It doesn't seem
like it to me, but maybe somebody thinks so.)
regards, tom lane
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