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…”
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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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.
Or even funnier: It gets parsed in octal, which does yield a valid zip code. Good luck finding that.
Well shit, my zip code starts with a 9.
I’m not sure if you’re getting it, so I’ll explain just in case.
In computer science a few conventions have emerged on how numbers should be interpreted, depending on how they start:
0b, so0b10011100, so01160x, so0x8EIf your zip code starts with 9, it won’t be interpreted as octal. You’re fine.
Well, you're right. I wasn't getting it, but I've also never seen any piece of software that would treat a single leading zero as octal. That's just a recipe for disaster, and it should use
0o116to be unambiguous(I am a software engineer, but was assuming you meant it was hardcoded to parse as octal, not some weird auto-detect)
I thought JavaScript did that, but it turns out it doesn’t. I thought Java did that, but it turns out it doesn’t. Python did it until version 2.7: https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/functions.html#int. C still does it: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/strtol
Interesting that
strtolin C does that. I've always explicitly passed in base 10 or 16, but I didn't know it would auto-detect if you passed 0. TIL.It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it's a bad convention. It's much worse if that's being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I'm pretty sure I've seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn't seem likely to be common.
Node doesn’t.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/parseInt
You seem to have missed the important phrase "in source code", as well as the entire second part of my comment discussing that runtime functions that parse user input are different.
I read that, but I thought it was a useless qualifier, because everything is source code. You probably meant “in a literal”.
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.
Yep. Much like we don't treat phone numbers like a number. The rule of thumb is that if you don't do any arithmetic with it, it is not a "number" but numeric.
Well, we don't, but every electonic tables software out in the wild on the other hand…
/j
Yes, I know that you can force it to become text by prepending'to the phone, choose an appropriate format for the cells, etc, etcThe point is that this often requires meddling after the phone gets displayed as something like
3e10Who 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.
Should be like
0o777to mimic hex0xFFI refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.