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…”
json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats. if you want to precisely store the full range of a 64 bit int (anything larger than 2^53 -1) then string is indeed the correct type
json doesn’t have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats.
No. numbers in JSON have arbitrary precision. The standard only specifies that implementations may impose restrictions on the allowed values.
This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted. Since software that implements IEEE 754 binary64 (double precision) numbers [IEEE754] is generally available and widely used, good interoperability can be achieved by implementations that expect no more precision or range than these provide, in the sense that implementations will approximate JSON numbers within the expected precision. A JSON number such as 1E400 or 3.141592653589793238462643383279 may indicate potential interoperability problems, since it suggests that the software that created it expects receiving software to have greater capabilities for numeric magnitude and precision than is widely available.
Let me show you what Ethan has to say about this: https://feddit.org/post/319546/174361
This is String - you’ve seen it before haven’t you, Gollum?
Protocol Buffers are hated, but they are needed.
The comment section proves that xml is far superior to json
It’s the API’s job to validate it either way. As it does that job, it may as well parse the string as an integer.
I refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.
Or even funnier: It gets parsed in octal, which does yield a valid zip code. Good luck finding that.
Who tf decided that a 0 prefix means base 8 in the first place? If a time machine was invented somehow I’m going to cap that man, after the guy that created JavaScript.
Oof.
I guess this is one of the reasons that some linters now scream if you don’t provide base when parsing numbers. But then again good luck finding it if it happens internally. Still, I feel like a ZIP should be treated as a string even if it looks like a number.
