PHP returning Numeric Values in JSON

When I wrote about launching a prototype of a new joind.in APIs, quite a few people started to try it out. My friend David Soria Parra emailed me to point out this many of the numbers in the API were being returned as strings. He said:

It ' s just a standard problem of PHP REST services. When I try to access it with Java I has to convert it over and over again to INTs.

I did had a quick look at the PHP manual page for Json_encode but I didn ' t see anything mentioning this. A few weeks later (my inbox is a black hole and it takes a while to the process these things) I fell over a throwaway comment To a undocumented constant json_numeric_check, and I added the constant name to my todo list. In the time it took for me to actually get around to Googling for this, some wonderful person updated the PHP manual page (This is what I love PHP) to include it as a documented option, and someone else had added a user contributed note about Us ing it.

It turns out, this constant does exactly what I need. Here's a simple use case:

echo json_encode (Array (' event_id ' = ' 603 ')), Echo json_encode (Array (' event_id ' = ' 603 '), Json_numeric_check);

and the output:

{"event_id": "603"} {"event_id": 603}

There is probably some situations in which you don ' t want all your looks-like-a-number data to be returned as a number, b UT for now it seems to is a good fit for api.joind.in.

PHP returning Numeric Values in JSON