Literal expression for array of vectors

General Usage
, , ,
3

Right. That still requires one extra “mental step” to look at the flat vector and the dimensions and conclude that the resulting shape makes sense.

I think I am looking for some literal syntax that preserves the “visual shape” of the matrix. With reshape I can kind of make it work, but one has to take care about the right order of the dimensions (that’s exactly the extra mental step I wanted to avoid :sweat_smile: )

E.g. this is one of the matrices that I am actually testing in my code (the eltype is not relevant for this test):

5×2 Matrix{Vector{Any}}:
 [1]  [2]
 [3]  []
 []   []
 []   []
 [4]  []

This is how I would like to write it with reshape (to get visually similar to the REPL output):

julia> reshape([
           [1], [2],
           [3], [ ],
           [ ], [ ],
           [ ], [ ],
           [4], [ ],
       ], (5, 2))
5×2 Matrix{Vector{Any}}:
 [1]  []
 [2]  []
 [3]  []
 []   [4]
 []   []

But of course it’s not right, since the vector elements are parsed in column-major order. So I would need an additional transpose:

julia> reshape([
           [1], [2],
           [3], [ ],
           [ ], [ ],
           [ ], [ ],
           [4], [ ],
       ], (2, 5)) |> permutedims
5×2 Matrix{Vector{Any}}:
 [1]  [2]
 [3]  []
 []   []
 []   []
 [4]  []

This is kind of clunky, but probably good enough for me.