Motoko's type system & converting between types

[mymikemiller]

@nomeata

For parsing text to numbers, we don’t have that at the moment. Surely something that we might want eventually, although maybe less pressing than initially perceived: In the typical architecture where the Motoko canister implements the backend of a service, tha a frontend (e.g. in JS) communicates via strongly typed candid value, you hopefully don’t have to do much parsing in the backend – Candid supports transmitting float values as is (float64).

Is Text to Nat conversion still not provided? I’m writing a backend that responds to http_request and needs to convert a query parameter into a number to be able to look up items in an array, so there’s no frontend to do the conversion for me.

I found this post which provides code to convert text to float, and it’s easy enough especially since I don’t need to worry about decimals, but I was just wondering if text->number conversion is provided in the base library anywhere yet.