[jira] [Closed] (ARROW-5271) [Python] Interface for converting pandas ExtensionArray / other custom array objects to pyarrow Array

["Joris Van den Bossche (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-5271?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Joris Van den Bossche closed ARROW-5271.
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    Resolution: Duplicate

> [Python] Interface for converting pandas ExtensionArray / other custom array objects to pyarrow Array
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: ARROW-5271
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-5271
>             Project: Apache Arrow
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Python
>            Reporter: Joris Van den Bossche
>            Priority: Major
>
> Related to ARROW-2428, which describes the issue to convert back to an ExtensionArray in {{to_pandas}}.
> To start supporting to convert custom ExtensionArrays (eg the nullable Int64Dtype in pandas, or the arrow-backed fletcher arrays, ...) to arrow Arrays (eg in {{pyarrow.array(..)}}), I think it would be good to define an interface or hook that external projects can implement and that pyarrow will call if available. 
> This would allow external projects to define how they can be converted to arrow arrays, without the need that pyarrow itself starts to gather a lot of special cased code for certain types (like pandas' nullable Int64).
> This could similar to how numpy looks for the {{\_\_array\_\_}} method, so we might call it {{\_\_arrow_array\_\_}}.
> See also https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/20612 for an issue discussing this on the pandas side.



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