any possible to vectorize getproperty as arr..name?

[ctarn]

In practice, I often need to extract the same property of each item of an array, and generate a property array.
To get the name property of an item, we can simply call x.name. It should be equal to getproperty(x, :name).

Given the array A, currently I have to call getproperty.(A, :name) to generate the array of property name. (or, something like [x.name for x in A])

This function is very frequently used, and thus the code can be very verbose, comparing between x.name and getproperty.(A, :name).

I want a syntax like A..name to vectorize the process. I have tried the following method.

..(value, name::Symbol) = getproperty.(value, name)

which enables the following usage:

julia> A = [(a=1, b=2), (a=3, b=4)]
2-element Vector{NamedTuple{(:a, :b), Tuple{Int64, Int64}}}:
 (a = 1, b = 2)
 (a = 3, b = 4)

julia> ..(A, :a)
2-element Vector{Int64}:
 1
 3

julia> A..:a
2-element Vector{Int64}:
 1
 3

However, A..a would raise UndefVarError error.

julia> A..a
ERROR: UndefVarError: `a` not defined

That is, the : can not be omitted unlike x.name.

May I ask if there is any possibility to solve it, or any other concise method to implement the feature?

Thank you very much!

[Zentrik]

If you're primarily working with property arrays you might want to check out StructArrays.jl

[chrstphrbrns]

#22710

[ctarn]

Thanks for your help. I have read the previous discussion. I heard StructArray before but haven't tried it. Closing the issue.