json2dict: Prevent converting boolean strings to numerical values

[ramikhaldi]

No description provided.

[drakeapps]

I don't really think this is correct. TCL doesn't have a boolean, but 0/1 are treated as the de facto booleans for the the most part. JSON, of course, has types and does have a boolean, true/false

TCL also supports true/yes/tru/t, etc for true, similar for false.

If you're wrapping it in an if condition, if {[dict get $json boolField]} should work with any of the above options.

If you want to safely check it, if {[string is true -strict [dict get $json boolField]]}

[ramikhaldi]

If you have a json and you want to convert it using the yajltcl c library to a dictionary, the c based function (no Tcl code needed) should handle it correctly and don't convert true/false to 1/0. Otherwise your dict will contain different values.. The following examples demonstrate what I mean:

set json {
	{
	   "valueTrue":true,
	   "valueFalse":false,
	   "x":"true",
	   "y":false,
	   "a":{
		  "b":1,
		  "c":"true",
		  "d":{
			 "p":false
		  }
	   }
	}
}

::yajl::json2dict $json

Result (Before the fix):

valueTrue 1 valueFalse 0 x true y 0 a {b 1 c true d {p 0}}

Result (after the fix):

valueTrue true valueFalse false x true y false a {b 1 c true d {p false}}

This behavior can only be observed with the unquoted true/false..

[gahr]

Basically anything that Tcl_GetBoolean accepts would be semantically correct, but I agree with @drakeapps that 0 and 1 looks like the most canonical values for booleans.

Otherwise your dict will contain different values

json2dict is inherently lossy. You can't map it back to the original json because we lose type information.

[bovine]

This yajl::json2dict method is fundamentally trying to be a drop-in replacement for json::json2dict, so the fact that there is a behavior difference with bools is the concern here.

[ramikhaldi]

The change has passed the ci checks and is also fixing the issue. Merge ?

[bovine]

After re-testing with json::json2dict, it looks like we should actually be returning true/false instead of 1/0 if we want to claim compatibility with the original implementation.

tclsh8.6 [~] package require json
1.3.4

tclsh8.6 [~] ::json::json2dict $json
valueTrue true valueFalse false x true y false a {b 1 c true d {p false}}

tclsh8.6 [~] ::yajl::json2dict $json
valueTrue 1 valueFalse 0 x true y 0 a {b 1 c true d {p 0}}