Question

I am writing an API in node.js that pulls data from a db, manipulates it, and sends it off to be consumed.

I have an object that looks like this:

{
    2734899508: "Chicken",
    2843594878: "Fish"
}

When I call JSON.stringify and pass the aforementioned object, I get this:

{
    "2734899508": "Chicken",
    "2843594878": "Fish"
}

I would like a string where the numeric keys are not turned into strings. How do I do this?

Answer 1

You could test whether each key/value is a stringified integer thus:

if(parseInt(value)==value) {
    value = parseInt(value);
}

Note: using == here intentionally rather than === because we want to coerce both to string.

If, however, you know which keys/values are stringified ints, then you can just do the middle line to fix them.

I would point out that if you’re sending this json to a browser or other javascript client, it won’t really make a difference whether you have an int or a string, unless you always use ===.