Thread: number of dimensions of a multi-dimensional array

Hi!

I am developing pl/pgsql functions with multi-dimensional array input
parameter.
I can use array_dims(), but it gives just the text representation of
the structure and it is not suitable when I want to iterate over the
whole array with the array_lower() and array_upper() functions. I want
to handle custom dimension/size arrays.
So my question is, how can I easily determine the number of the
dimensions of an array?

Thanks,
Andrew

On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 02:15:39PM +0100, &ru wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I am developing pl/pgsql functions with multi-dimensional array input
> parameter.
> I can use array_dims(), but it gives just the text representation of
> the structure and it is not suitable when I want to iterate over the
> whole array with the array_lower() and array_upper() functions. I want
> to handle custom dimension/size arrays.
> So my question is, how can I easily determine the number of the
> dimensions of an array?

This illustrates what to do :)

SELECT
    array_dims(array[[1,2],[3,4]]) AS "text representation",
    string_to_array( array_dims(array[[1,2],[3,4]]) ,'][') AS "pieces",
    array_upper( string_to_array( array_dims(array[[1,2],[3,4]]) ,']['), 1) AS "number of dimensions"
;

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778

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