Getting A Slice Of An Array In PostgreSQL

Postgres has a very natural syntax for grabbing a slice of an array. You simply add brackets after the array declaring the lower and upper bounds of the slice separated by a colon.

> select (array[4,5,6,7,8,9])[2:4];
  array
---------
 {5,6,7}

Notice that the bounds are inclusive, the array index is 1-based, and the array declaration above needs to be wrapped in parentheses in order to not trip up the array slice syntax.

You can also select rectangular slices from two dimensional arrays like so:

> select (array[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]])[2:3][1:2];
     array
---------------
 {{4,5},{7,8}}