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[apps-discuss] CBOR: convert CBOR bignum to base64url JSON string

"Manger, James H" <James.H.Manger@team.telstra.com> Fri, 24 May 2013 00:33 UTC

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From: "Manger, James H" <James.H.Manger@team.telstra.com>
To: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>, Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 10:33:13 +1000
Thread-Topic: CBOR: convert CBOR bignum to base64url JSON string
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Subject: [apps-discuss] CBOR: convert CBOR bignum to base64url JSON string
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A minor (non-controversial?) suggested change for draft-bormann-cbor:

Section 4.1. "Converting From CBOR to JSON" 11th dot point says:

  o  A bignum (major type 7, tag value 8 or 9) becomes a JSON number.

This might be right in theory, but I don't think it is in practice.
Presumably a bignum was used because the value (or other expected value for the same field) is too large for normal (32-bit, 64-bit) number types, which are the types many implementations use represent a JSON number. Hence they will fail with a bignum.

I suggest converting a bignum to a base64url encoding (without padding) in a JSON string. This is what you get if the positive bignum tag was ignored and you just processed the byte string that followed. For a negative bignum stick "-" before the base64url encoding.

--
James Manger

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