Select different parsing Integers method

Hi Paolo,

after thinking a while over this request I don't believe it is necessary. The decode method was also taken because of user request, simply because it is possible with it to decode also unsigned values as well as hex or octal values. The enhancement of the BooleanConverter for different flavors is useful because all flavors share the same code, but this is does not apply for the converters mentioned by you. You can easily register such a converter and therefore I don't think it must be already present in XStream:

xstream.registerConverter(new ByteConverter() {
    public Object fromString(String str) {
        return Byte.valueOf(str);
    }
});

Thanks for your suggestion though,
Jörg

Closed after receiving no further comment.

Hmmmh. I was bitten by this "feature" – the sample xml I got did indeed use leading zeroes (for padding, I suppose, such that both alphabetic/lexical and numeric sort work the same); and got a nasty exception from values like "008".

While I can see how it might sometimes be useful to be able to decode hex and other values, I am not convinced this feature is good, unless it's well documented, and clearly states that leading zeroes drastically change interpretation of the value.

I will work-around this problem (by pre-processing to strip out zeroes), so there's no need to re-open it. But I'll add a comment just in case other users might also get tripped by the feature.

I would ask that this issue be reconsidered. I think it very clearly a violation of the principal of least surprise. I think that the default handling of numbers with leading zero's would be to treat them as decimal numbers. I would suspect that octal is very rarely used with xstream. I would think that handling octal should be something that would be explicitly requested.