This thread being cross posted has made it a bit
confusing Greg Stark wrote: Nobody has ever suggested filtering out empty elements or dealing specially with spaces or anything else like that. If you're talking about that then you've missed the original question. "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.)" That means to me dropping empty strings or removing values that don't make sense. Then the argument begins what values make since to drop. Just zero length strings or include strings with million white spaces??? It can't be rejected, Its an Empty shopping list although a worthless shopping list .One last try. If there's a column called "shopping list" which is a comma-separated list of items to buy in the store and I store '' in it. How many items do you think that means you should go shopping for? Do you think that's one item that should be rejected because it's an empty string? Or do you think that's an empty list with zero items listed? What would it look like if it was a zero-length list? You can ask what would it look like if it was a shopping list of one item called ''. But I agree both are theoretically consistent, but one is actually useful in 99% of use cases. The other is only useful in unusual cases. I'm still confused which one you want here |