Hi
Current implementation of PL/Python does not allow the use of multi-dimensional arrays, for both input and output parameters. This forces end users to introduce workarounds like casting arrays to text before passing them to the functions and parsing them after, which is an error-prone approach
This patch adds support for multi-dimensional arrays as both input and output parameters for PL/Python functions. The number of dimensions supported is limited by Postgres MAXDIM macrovariable, by default equal to 6. Both input and output multi-dimensional arrays should have fixed dimension sizes, i.e. 2-d arrays should represent MxN matrix, 3-d arrays represent MxNxK cube, etc.
This patch does not support multi-dimensional arrays of composite types, as composite types in Python might be represented as iterators and there is no obvious way to find out when the nested array stops and composite type structure starts. For example, if we have a composite type of (int, text), we can try to return "[ [ [1,'a'], [2,'b'] ], [ [3,'c'], [4,'d'] ] ]", and it is hard to find out that the first two lists are lists, and the third one represents structure. Things are getting even more complex when you have arrays as members of composite type. This is why I think this limitation is reasonable.
Given the function:
CREATE FUNCTION test_type_conversion_array_int4(x int4[]) RETURNS int4[] AS $$
return x
$$ LANGUAGE plpythonu;
Before patch:
# SELECT * FROM test_type_conversion_array_int4(ARRAY[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]);
ERROR: cannot convert multidimensional array to Python list
DETAIL: PL/Python only supports one-dimensional arrays.
CONTEXT: PL/Python function "test_type_conversion_array_int4"
After patch:
# SELECT * FROM test_type_conversion_array_int4(ARRAY[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]);
INFO: ([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], <type 'list'>)
test_type_conversion_array_int4
---------------------------------
{{1,2,3},{4,5,6}}
(1 row)
--
Best regards,
Alexey Grishchenko