nushell/crates
Benjamin Lee 53beba7acc
Support passing an empty list to sort, uniq, sort-by, and uniq-by (issue #5957) (#8669)
# Description

Currently, all four of these commands return a (rather-confusing)
spanless error when passed an empty list:

```
> [] | sort
Error: 
  × no values to work with
  help: no values to work with
```

This PR changes these commands to always output `[]` if the input is
`[]`.

```
> [] | sort
╭────────────╮
│ empty list │
╰────────────╯
> [] | uniq-by foo
╭────────────╮
│ empty list │
╰────────────╯
```

I'm not sure what the original logic was here, but in the case of `sort`
and `uniq`, I think the current behavior is straightforwardly wrong.

`sort-by` and `uniq-by` are a bit more complicated, since they currently
try to perform some validation that the specified column name is present
in the input (see #8667 for problems with this validation, where a
possible outcome is removing the validation entirely). When passed `[]`,
it's not possible to do any validation because there are no records.
This opens up the possibility for situations like the following:

```
> [[foo]; [5] [6]] | where foo < 3 | sort-by bar
╭────────────╮
│ empty list │
╰────────────╯
```

I think there's a strong argument that `[]` is the best output for these
commands as well, since it makes pipelines like `$table | filter
$condition | sort-by $column` more predictable. Currently, this pipeline
will throw an error if `filter` evaluates to `[]`, but work fine
otherwise. This makes it difficult to write reliable code, especially
since users are not likely to encounter the `filter -> []` case in
testing (issue #5957). The only workaround is to insert manual checks
for an empty result. IMO, this is significantly worse than the "you can
typo a column name without getting an error" problem shown above.

Other commands that take column arguments (`get`, `select`, `rename`,
etc) already have `[] -> []`, so there's existing precedent for this
behavior.

The core question here is "what columns does `[]` have"? The current
behavior of `sort-by` is "no columns", while the current behavior of
`select` is "all possible columns". Both answers lead to accepting some
likely-buggy code without throwing on error, but in order to do better
here we would need something like `Value::Table` that tracks columns on
empty tables.

If other people disagree with this logic, I'm happy to split out the
`sort-by` and `uniq-by` changes into another PR.

# User-Facing Changes

`sort`, `uniq`, `sort-by`, and `uniq-by` now return `[]` instead of
throwing an error when input is `[]`.

# After Submitting

> If your PR had any user-facing changes, update [the
documentation](https://github.com/nushell/nushell.github.io) after the
PR is merged, if necessary. This will help us keep the docs up to date.

The existing behavior was not documented, and the new behavior is what
you would expect by default, so I don't think we need to update
documentation.

---------

Co-authored-by: Reilly Wood <reilly.wood@icloud.com>
2023-03-29 19:55:38 -07:00
..
nu_plugin_custom_values bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu_plugin_example bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu_plugin_formats bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu_plugin_gstat bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu_plugin_inc bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu_plugin_python update nu_plugin_python due to signature changes (#8107) 2023-02-18 13:27:24 +00:00
nu_plugin_query bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-cli Clean up unnecessary macro use (#8607) 2023-03-25 20:17:20 +13:00
nu-cmd-lang Remove autoprinting of loop block values (#8618) 2023-03-26 13:23:54 +13:00
nu-color-config Clean up unnecessary macro use (#8607) 2023-03-25 20:17:20 +13:00
nu-command Support passing an empty list to sort, uniq, sort-by, and uniq-by (issue #5957) (#8669) 2023-03-29 19:55:38 -07:00
nu-engine auto-expand paths in the $nu variable (#8653) 2023-03-29 13:23:58 -05:00
nu-explore Clean up unnecessary macro use (#8607) 2023-03-25 20:17:20 +13:00
nu-glob bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-json bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-parser Improve inferred record types and type compat (#8649) 2023-03-29 10:23:10 +13:00
nu-path bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-plugin bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-pretty-hex bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-protocol Add or-patterns, fix var binding scope (#8633) 2023-03-27 11:31:57 +13:00
nu-system bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-table bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-term-grid bump to 0.77.2 (#8496) 2023-03-17 21:29:15 +13:00
nu-test-support Remove once_cell dependency from nu-test-support create. (#8568) 2023-03-22 19:36:52 +01:00
nu-utils REFACTOR: remove the redundant path expand from the tests of the standard library (#8666) 2023-03-29 16:17:00 -05:00
README.md Remove old nushell/merge engine-q 2022-02-07 14:54:06 -05:00

Nushell core libraries and plugins

These sub-crates form both the foundation for Nu and a set of plugins which extend Nu with additional functionality.

Foundational libraries are split into two kinds of crates:

  • Core crates - those crates that work together to build the Nushell language engine
  • Support crates - a set of crates that support the engine with additional features like JSON support, ANSI support, and more.

Plugins are likewise also split into two types:

  • Core plugins - plugins that provide part of the default experience of Nu, including access to the system properties, processes, and web-connectivity features.
  • Extra plugins - these plugins run a wide range of different capabilities like working with different file types, charting, viewing binary data, and more.