Re: casting strings to multidimensional arrays yields strange

Tom Lane wrote:
> Right now I think the sanest behavior would be to throw an error on
> non-rectangular input. Once we have support for null elements in
> arrays, however, it would arguably be reasonable to pad with NULLs
> where needed, so that the above would be read as
>
> {{1,2},{2,3},{4,NULL}}
>
> {{1,NULL},{2,3},{4,5}}
>
> respectively. If that's the direction we want to head in, it would
> probably be best to leave array_in alone until we can do that; users
> tend to get unhappy when we change behavior repeatedly.

I think that even once we support NULL array elements, they should be
explicitly requested -- i.e. throwing an error on non-rectangular input
is still the right thing to do. I haven't suggested that in the past
because of the backward-compatibility issue, but maybe now is the time
to bite the bullet.

If you think this qualifies as a bug fix for 7.5, I can take a look at
it next week.

Joe