jQuery.param() semantically incorrectly handles boolean properties

[Finesse]

Boolean values can't be passed to query string explicitly. Because of it jQuery.param() turns boolean properties of input object to strings: true is turned to 'true' and false is turned to 'false'. For example: jQuery.param({ foo: true, bar: false }) returns 'foo=true&bar=false' (http://codepen.io/anon/pen/BoQXVg).

In most cases server side scripts don't have ability to check whether query variable was originally boolean or string and auto conversion to boolean turns both 'true' and 'false' to true. It would be great if jQuery.param() handles boolean properties like HTML checkbox element does: returns on or 1 if the state is true and '' (empty string) if the state is false. For example: jQuery.param({ foo: true, bar: false }) would return 'foo=1&bar='.

[jzaefferer]

That sounds like a pretty drastic backwards-incompatible change, which is very unlikely to land even in a new major release.

It also seems easy enough to work around by using a custom param implementation. Or is there a dependency on jQuery.param that you have to work around?

[Finesse]

Dependency: jQuery.ajax(). I use this solution to process data object before passing it to jQuery.ajax():

function filterObjForJqueryParam( data ) {
    var obj = data instanceof Array ? [] : {};

    for ( var i in data )
        if ( data.hasOwnProperty( i ) )
            switch ( typeof data[ i ] ) {
                case 'boolean':
                    obj[ i ] = data[ i ] ? 1 : '';
                    break;
                case 'object':
                    obj[ i ] = filterObjForJqueryParam( data[ i ] );
                    break;
                default:
                    obj[ i ] = data[ i ];
            }

    return obj;
}

$.ajax({
    url: 'http://example.com/',
    type: 'POST',
    data: filterObjForJqueryParam({ foo: true, bar: false })
})

A flag which controls output behavior can be passed to jQuery.param(). Described problem can be controlled the similar way. If this change is still impossible I will continue use my solution.

[dmethvin]

I think the docs say it well.

Note: Because there is no universally agreed-upon specification for param strings, it is not possible to encode complex data structures using this method in a manner that works ideally across all languages supporting such input. Use JSON format as an alternative for encoding complex data instead.