Joris Van den Bossche created ARROW-5271:
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Summary: [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
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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