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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Ran across this today and spent a good 20 to 25 minutes trying to debug why my own code was failing when it was jq that was rounding an id in the JSON response.

Submitting this to let others that use jq beware of this :/

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Thanks for submitting this interesting issue. Out of interest, what system are you on, and did jq come from a package manager? If you build it from source, it should work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362060

macOS Big Sur on a MacBook Pro M1. Installed via the Homebrew package manager.

I've always (20+ years) known that Javascript numbers were floats, I've thus always assumed JSON numbers to be as well. Is this not the spec? I just store big integers in JSON strings.

JSON numbers are arbitrary precision, because the spec doesn't limit the precision in any way.

You are right, but as theamk pointed out in another comment, the spec does tell you to "expect no more precision or range than" IEEE754 doubles. So, don't count on arbitrary precision...

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7159#section-6

Those numbers are so big, I'm curious what your use case is for them.

partitioning using prefixes?

Storing Twitter IDs, of course!

The comment states that they're IDs.

They could happily exist as strings in json if they're just IDs.

I've always found the directive "unless you do math on it, it's a string" to be useful when working with json.

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