Re: get the array value?

2008/12/25 Victor Nawothnig <victor(dot)nawothnig(at)gmail(dot)com>:
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 7:15 AM, Charles.Hou <ivan(dot)hou(at)msa(dot)hinet(dot)net> wrote:
>> name[] = { JOHN , ALEX , TEST ,""}
>>
>> SQL : select name from table1 where 'TEST' = any (name)
>>
>> return: { JOHN , ALEX , TEST }
>>
>> in this sql command, how can i get the index of 'TEST' is 3 ?
>
> First of all. I assume the code above is meant to be pseudo-code, otherwise
> this makes not much sense to me.
>
> But if I understand you correctly, that you want to find the index (or position)
> of a specific item in an array, then you have to write a function that iterates
> over the array and returns the index.
>
> This is a bad design however and it doesn't scale up well with large arrays.
>
> A better approach is storing the array elements as rows in a table with an
> index, which can be queried more efficiently.
>
> For example:
>
> CREATE TABLE records (
> id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY
> );
>
> CREATE TABLE names (
> record_id INTEGER REFERENCES records,
> position INTEGER NOT NULL,
> name TEXT NOT NULL,
> UNIQUE (record_id, position)
> );
>
> This way you can easily search by doing something like
>
> SELECT position FROM names
> WHERE name = 'TEST';
>
> Regards,
> Victor Nawothnig

I absolutely agree with Victor, arrays doesn't supply normalization
(but in some cases arrays are very useful). You can write SQL function
IndexOf (for small arrays):

postgres=# create or replace function indexof(anyarray, anyelement)
returns integer as $$
select i
from
generate_series(array_lower($1,1),array_upper($1,1)) g(i)
where $1[i] = $2 limit 1;
$$ language sql immutable;
CREATE FUNCTION
postgres=# select indexof(array['Pavel','Jirka'],'Jirka');
indexof
---------
2
(1 row)

Regards
Pavel Stehule

>
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