Hi everyone,

I am Christian Massey a computer science student at York University and I wish to work on Providing import and export functions for popular data formats like JSON, XML , PHP, ... for Connector/C and MariaDB Server. I have been inspecting the code to understand how the dynamic column packed string is encoded and I see kind on big endian encoding( Correct me if I am wrong please).

Also I see that the old format already work like arrays and it uses 3 bits for encoding type which is the main reason why not all types  in the enum are supported in this old format.

     DBUG_ASSERT(((type - 1) & (~7)) == 0); /* fit in 3 bits */

(Again please correct me if I am wrong. The encoding is not easy to understand)

My Question is do we need to create a completely new type to support arrays or do we change the old format which already work like arrays in a way but lacks support for some types(I don't know which of the enums yet). 

Please, I wish to write a proposal for this project and hope to discuss more with mentors for more clarification on how we are going to implement this as it seems to be a very important if not the most critical part of this project.

Cheers,

Kris.