chars get treated as JSON numbers not JSON strings

[zoe-mcelderry]

• What is the issue you have?

I am creating some JSON from some C++ datatypes, one of which is the char datatype. I would expect this to be treated as a JSON string, but when I call the dump method it outputs the value as if it were a JSON number.

• Please describe the steps to reproduce the issue. Can you provide a small but working code example?

nlohmann::json json;
char sample = 'a';
json["char"] = sample;
std::cout << json.dump ();

• What is the expected behavior?

Expect the output to show : {"char":"a"}

• And what is the actual behavior instead?

The output I get is : {"char":97}

• Which compiler and operating system are you using? Is it a supported compiler?

OS is Debian 9.3, compiler is g++ 6.3.0

• Did you use a released version of the library or the version from the develop branch?

Tag v3.1.2

[nlohmann]

This is known behavior (can’t find the respective issue right now) which can’t be fixed. It should be better explained in the documentation though.

[zoe-mcelderry]

Ok, thanks anyway. Apologies for raising a duplicate.

[OvermindDL1]

For note, your expected output of "a" is not a character, but rather it's string (null-terminated once parsed), and what should happen if the input 'string' was multi character for example? An integer is the only logical representation of a character in JSON since JSON doesn't have a specific character type.

Plus a char is just a 1-byte integer, hard to distinguish that from, say, an actual 1-byte integer. ^.^

[nlohmann]

Related: #1052 #276

[nlohmann]

@zoe-mcelderry No worries. I shall leave #1052 open as we should mention this in the documentation.