Meme transcription:
Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?
Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”
What’s the point of your schema if the receiving end is JavaScript, for example? You can convert a string to BigNumber, but you’ll get wrong data if you’re sending a number.
What makes you think so?
const bigJSON = '{"gross_gdp": 12345678901234567890}';
JSON.parse(bigJSON, (key, value, context) => {
if (key === "gross_gdp") {
// Ignore the value because it has already lost precision
return BigInt(context.source);
}
return value;
});
> {gross_gdp: 12345678901234567890n}
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/JSON/parse
It’s neither JSON’s nor JavaScript’s fault that you don’t want to make a simple function call to properly deserialize the data.
I’m not following your point so I think I might be misunderstanding it. If the types of numbers you want to express are literally incapable of being expressed using JSON numbers then yes, you should absolutely use string (or maybe even an object of multiple fields).
The point is that everything is expressable as JSON numbers, it’s when those numbers are read by JS there’s an issue
