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Add optional support for json.Marshaler and json.Unmarshaler via transcoding#673

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benluddy:json-interface-transcoding
Jun 18, 2025
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Add optional support for json.Marshaler and json.Unmarshaler via transcoding#673
fxamacker merged 2 commits intofxamacker:masterfrom
benluddy:json-interface-transcoding

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@benluddy benluddy commented Jun 11, 2025

Description

Recognition of types implementing these interfaces is important for users requiring drop-in compatibility with encoding/json. Without it, if a type implements the JSON interfaces without also implementing the corresponding CBOR interfaces, its JSON and CBOR representations can have substantial structural differences.

Consider what can happen with a type like https://pkg.go.dev/k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/util/intstr#IntOrString if it were to only implement json.Marshaler and json.Unmarshaler (and not cbor.Marshaler or cbor.Unmarshaler):

  1. ToJSON(IntOrString{Type: String, StrVal: "a"}) => "a"
  2. FromJSON[any]("a") => string("a")
  3. ToCBOR(string("a")) => 0x6161
  4. FromCBOR[IntOrString](0x6161) => **error: can't unmarshal CBOR text string number to struct**

With automatic transcoding, we can preserve the faithful roundtrip:

  1. FromCBOR[IntOrString](0x6161) => FromJSON[IntOrString](CBORToJSON(0x6161)) => FromJSON[IntOrString]("a") => IntOrString{Type: String, StrVal: "a"}

PR Was Proposed and Welcomed in Currently Open Issue

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@benluddy Thanks for contributing this feature! I left some minor comments.

We already discussed adding this feature, so I opened issue #673 just to have an open issue to link to that can be closed by this PR.

benluddy added 2 commits June 17, 2025 10:44
If the user provides a JSON-to-CBOR transcode function, a value whose type implements json.Marshaler
and not cbor.Marshaler will be encoded by first calling its MarshalJSON method, then transcoding the
result to CBOR.

Signed-off-by: Ben Luddy <bluddy@redhat.com>
Users can provide a function to transcode an encoded CBOR data item to JSON. If provided, then
unmarshaling into a value whose type implements json.Unmarshaler, but not cbor.Unmarshaler, will
first transcode the input bytes to JSON and then invoke UnmarshalJSON on the destination value.

Signed-off-by: Ben Luddy <bluddy@redhat.com>
@benluddy benluddy force-pushed the json-interface-transcoding branch from 6f23503 to ba129eb Compare June 17, 2025 14:46
@benluddy benluddy requested a review from fxamacker June 17, 2025 14:48
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Thank you! LGTM 👍

@fxamacker fxamacker merged commit 4e825ca into fxamacker:master Jun 18, 2025
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@fxamacker fxamacker added this to the v2.9.0 milestone Jul 5, 2025
@fxamacker fxamacker added the enhancement New feature or request label Jul 5, 2025
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