String or List of Strings in One Pixeltable Column?

In Pixeltable, columns are typed, and the absence of a direct "string or list of strings" union type necessitates using untyped pxt.Json for values that may vary between a string and a list, or using typed pxt.Json[[str]] for a consistent list of strings. To manage inconsistent data inputs, a small User Defined Function (UDF) can normalize data, which can then be processed with the list_iterator for row-wise operations. While pxt.String is used for single strings, pxt.Json[[str]] is preferred for uniform lists that may be exploded into multiple rows, and pxt.Array is reserved for numeric or embedding tensors. For messy or inconsistent inputs, storing them as untyped Json and using UDFs to convert them into a typed Json format is advised, enabling easier querying and processing. The list_iterator function is crucial for breaking down lists into individual elements for analytics tasks, requiring typed Json inputs. For complex JSON structures, such as object-detection outputs or nested JSON from APIs, maintaining the raw response in pxt.Json and selectively projecting necessary strings for indices is suggested, with UDFs and list_iterators facilitating the handling and transformation of data for practical use cases.

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