## Summary
- When an embedding function returns an empty list (e.g. `[]`) for an
input row — as can happen when a model produces no output for a blank
string — `_append_vector_columns` crashed with `ArrowInvalid: Length of
item not correct: expected N but got array of size 0` because PyArrow
cannot fit a zero-length value into a fixed-size list element.
- The fix adds a validation step in `gen()`, inside
`_append_vector_columns`, that replaces any vector whose length does not
match the expected `ndims` (including empty lists and `None`) with
`None` before `pa.array()` is called.
- `None` is a valid null in a PyArrow fixed-size list array, so the bad
entry flows into `_handle_bad_vectors` and is handled according to the
caller-supplied `on_bad_vectors` policy (`error` / `drop` / `fill` /
`null`) instead of causing an unconditional crash.
## Test plan
- [ ] Added `test_embedding_with_empty_output_vectors` in
`python/python/tests/test_embeddings.py` that uses an embedding function
returning `[]` for empty-string inputs, calls `table.add(...,
on_bad_vectors="drop")`, and asserts no crash and that bad rows are
correctly dropped.
- [ ] Existing `test_embedding_with_bad_results` continues to pass (NaN
vectors still handled correctly).
- [ ] Verified manually that `pa.array([[1.,2.,3.,4.], []],
type=pa.list_(pa.float32(), 4))` raises `ArrowInvalid` without the fix,
and succeeds with `None` in place of `[]`.
Fixes#1672
---------
Co-authored-by: Will Jones <willjones127@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
