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Comment by matja | Hacker News Reader

Even with integers (comes up often for large numeric IDs):

   JSON.stringify(JSON.parse('{"kids":10000000000000001}')) -> '{"kids":10000000000000000}'

How do JSON schemas handle "must be an integer", and having to pass a string to get the necessary value?

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That’s not an issue with json, but with json libraries. For better or (IMO) for worse

  {“kids”: 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890}

is perfectly legal json.

If every JSON library actively chooses not to implement the JSON spec, that sounds like an issue with JSON to me.

More precisely, an issue with different literal types instead of one like in XML.

In XML, every attribute or text fragment is a string, to be POSSIBLY parsed as a string, integer, date etc. according to what applications choose to do (usually according to an explicit schema).

In JSON, YAML, etc. there are at least integers, strings and floating point numbers, introducing arbitrary representation choices (1, 1.0, "1", "1.0") and implementation artifacts (e.g. numerical limits).

Separate types is fine, but JSON doesn't specify a minimum range or precision of the number type that a implementation must have, so the number type is unreliable (and string has to be used instead). To handle any number, a JSON library needs to use an arbitrary-precision number type, which no common one does because of the huge performance hit.

So, no better than XML really :D

Look at MongoDBs "extended json". They serialize this as { "$numberLong": "10000000000000001" }.

With a custom extension to the json-schema adding property bsonType:long, instead of type:int. Along with a few other data types like datetimes, uuid, regex. It can be integrated with custom hooks in many schema validators.

I think you can use a string type with a regexp pattern.

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