parquet-cli reports nested columns as null

[acdha]

Describe the bug, including details regarding any error messages, version, and platform.

Using Parquet CLI 1.15.0 via Mac Homebrew, I noticed some surprising behaviour with the parquet-cli and nested columns.

parquet schema catalog.parquet returns a schema showing the nested types (I've trimmed the field list slightly):

{
  "type" : "record",
  "name" : "schema",
  "fields" : [ {
    "name" : "item_id",
    "type" : "string"
  }, {
    "name" : "title",
    "type" : [ "null", "string" ],
    "default" : null
  }, {
    "name" : "language",
    "type" : [ "null", "string" ],
    "default" : null
  }, {
    "name" : "subjects",
    "type" : [ "null", {
      "type" : "array",
      "items" : {
        "type" : "record",
        "name" : "list",
        "fields" : [ {
          "name" : "element",
          "type" : "string"
        } ]
      }
    } ],
    "default" : null
  }, {
    "name" : "authors",
    "type" : [ "null", {
      "type" : "array",
      "items" : {
        "type" : "record",
        "name" : "list",
        "namespace" : "list2",
        "fields" : [ {
          "name" : "element",
          "type" : "string"
        } ]
      }
    } ],
    "default" : null
  } ]
}

parquet dictionary -c subjects.list.element catalog.parquet will return the expected values for those fields as well:

Row group 0 dictionary for "subjects.list.element":
     0: "Bestsellers"
     1: "Biography"
     2: "Fantasy Fiction"
     3: "Music Theory"
     4: "Disability"
     5: "Family"
     6: "Young Adult"

However, when using cat or head to display the file contents those fields are displayed as null:

{"bmc_id": "id1", "title": null, "language": "en", "subjects": null, "authors": null}
{"bmc_id": "id2", "title": null, "language": "en", "subjects": null, "authors": null,}
{"bmc_id": "id3", "title": null, "language": "en", "subjects": null, "authors": null}

Other tools like PyArrow or Pandas do display those values as arrays. I created this as a bug because it looks like it's working and if those fields are nullable, there's no way to tell whether the null value is correct.

Component(s)

No response