Lorna Mitchell has a quick reminder about an issue in the new joind.in API version - everything was being returned as strings, even integers.

A few weeks later (my inbox is a black hole and it takes a while to process these things) I fell over a throwaway comment to an undocumented constant JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK, and I added the constant name to my todo list. In the time it took for me to actually get around to googling for this, some wonderful person updated the PHP manual page (this is why I love PHP) to include it as a documented option, and someone else had added a user contributed note about using it.

This option, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK, tells the json_encode function to property consider numbers in its encoding process. It applies globally, so if there's an instance where you don't want something assigned as a number, you might need to go with another, more flexible JSON encoding option. You can find information about this and other possible options json_encode can take on its manual page.