> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 11:34:16AM -0500, Dian M Fay wrote:
> > Thanks, I need to remember to not skipp doc building for testing process
> > even for such small changes. Hope now I didn't forget anything.
> >
> > > On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 09:58:43AM -0500, Dian M Fay wrote:
> >
> > > Here's a full editing pass on the documentation, with v45 and Pavel's
> > > doc-whitespaces-fix.patch applied. I also corrected a typo in one of the
> > > added hints.
> >
> > Great! I've applied almost all of it, except:
> >
> > + A <type>jsonb</type> value will accept assignments to nonexistent
> > subscript
> > + paths as long as the nonexistent elements being traversed are all
> > arrays.
> >
> > Maybe I've misunderstood the intention, but there is no requirement
> > about arrays for creating such an empty path. I've formulated it as:
> >
> > + A <type>jsonb</type> value will accept assignments to nonexistent
> > subscript
> > + paths as long as the last existing path key is an object or an array.
>
> My intention there was to highlight the difference between:
>
> * SET obj['a']['b']['c'] = '"newvalue"'
> * SET arr[0][0][3] = '"newvalue"'
>
> obj has to conform to {"a": {"b": {...}}} in order to receive the
> assignment of the nested c. If it doesn't, that's the error case we
> discussed earlier. But arr can be null, [], and so on, and any missing
> structure [[[null, null, null, "newvalue"]]] will be created.
If arr is 'null', or any other scalar value, such subscripting will work
only one level deep because they represented internally as an array of
one element. If arr is '[]' the path will comply by definition. So it's
essentially the same as for objects with no particular difference. If
such a quirk about scalars being treated like arrays is bothering, we
could also bend it in this case as well (see the attached version).