[GitHub] [arrow] spenczar commented on issue #35624: [Python] Can't provide Arrow array when filling nulls of a fixed size list array

["spenczar (via GitHub)" <gi...@apache.org>]

spenczar commented on issue #35624:
URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/35624#issuecomment-1561345012

   Oh wow, `fill_null` works quite differently than I expected. Your example of passing it an array and it working _elementwise_ is very surprising to me! `fill_value`'s documentation is a bit misleading, then; it says
   
   > Replace each null element in values with fill_value. 
   
   But it _should_ say something like "Replace each null element in values with a corresponding element from fill_value." 
   
   That's not a perfect phrasing, since it's a bit complicated and hard to fit into a short sentence. As I understand it, the behavior is:
    - If `fill_value` is scalar-like, replace each null element in `values` with `fill_value`.
    - If `fill_value` is array-like, replace the `i`th null element in `values` with the `i`th element in `fill_value`.
   
   This issue seems to fracture into three issues:
    - `as_py` is too crude
    - documentation needs a tweak
    - can't make an explicit scalar element of a fixed-size list (which sounds kind of like https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/18987, perhaps)
   
   Does that seem right?
   
   


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