Fake Number returns String

[djarbz]

Why does your fake number generator return a string?
I would imaging that most cases were someone would want a fake number they want a number and not a string, and if they needed a string it is easy enough to convert it.

[dmgk]

Everything (except Date) in Faker returns strings. The standard library already provides ways to generate fake (random) numbers with math/rand and crypto/rand.

[bwiggs]

Second on this. I want to have a consistent way of generating fake data. Using this lib for some data, and crypto.Rand for other data types just leads to inconsistent data generation within our test suites.

[charleshimmer]

I agree with @djarbz, returning a number type makes a lot more sense when you're generating a number. The argument that the standard library already provides way to generated fake numbers is non-sensical IMO. If you want any rand number sure the math/rand will work but as soon as you want more control like a number between this range, or a positive number, or a negative number etc you're having to write little utility functions one would hope their fake data lib would do for them.

[dmgk]

Number interface now has three new methods that return positive integers:

NumberInt(digits int) int     // => 213
NumberInt32(digits int) int32 // => 92938
NumberInt64(digits int) int64 // => 1689541633257139096

That should reduce the need for conversion helper functions. faker.Number().Number() still returns string to preserve backward compatibility.

[bwiggs]

Excellent, thank you!