Non string object keys (CBOR)

[Pique7]

Are numeric keys supported/possible (especially in CBOR serialization)?
Example:

{
  1: "value1",
  2: "value2"
}

I haven't found a solution yet.

[danielaparker]

For writing CBOR, if using cbor_bytes_encoder or cbor_stream_encoder, you can write a key as any CBOR value, numeric, object, whatever, basically write pairs of two values (the first the key, the second the corresponding value) bracketed inside a begin_object and an end_object. Similarly with MessagePack.

For reading CBOR, we have cbor_event_reader, you can get an idea how it works from the test cases, basically it allows you to receive a stream of CBOR events including value/value pairs for objects (CBOR maps). These tests cases show string keys, but it can handle other types too.

When interacting with the rest of the jsoncons library, the keys currently get converted to/from strings, though. For example, you can use decode_cbor to read CBOR bytes into a std::map with an uint64_t key, but the key would first be converted into a string and then back to a uint64_t. This follows from the fact that the jsoncons pipeline that is common to all our data formats assumes string keys. This is something I'd like to revisit sometime.