Comment by VeganPizza69 Ⓥ@lemmy.world on Surely "1337" is the same as 1337, right?

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…”

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:

decimal (the usual system with digits from 0 to 9): no prefix
binary (digits 0 and 1): prefix 0b, so 0b1001110
octal (digits 0 through 7): prefix 0, so 0116
hexadecimal (digits 0 through 9 and then A through E): prefix 0x, so 0x8E

If 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 0o116 to 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’ve also never seen any piece of software that would treat a single leading zero as octal

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

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.

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…

Yes, I know that you can force it to become text by prepending ' to the phone, choose an appropriate format for the cells, etc, etc

The point is that this often requires meddling after the phone gets displayed as something like 3e10

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.

Should be like 0o777 to mimic hex 0xFF

I refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.

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Surely "1337" is the same as 1337, right?(sopuli.xyz)

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