Post History

Is an Integer faster than a string in JSON

I'm working on an API to respond some data about a bunch of orders and items.

The order and item numbers are always an integer (it's the `order.id` and `item.id` value, respectively).

Originally the response included each order number and each item number as a string, something like:

```
{
  "orders": [
    {
      "id": "12345",
      "item": [
        "123",
        "124",
        "125",
        "126"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "95812",
      "item": [
        "173",
        "198"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
```

I instructed the team to make the values as integers rather than strings, that exact response now looks like:

```
{
  "orders": [
    {
      "id": 12345,
      "item": [
        123,
        124,
        125,
        126
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 95812,
      "item": [
        173,
        198
      ]
    }
  ]
}
```

My question is if there is really any purpose to what I've done? We're never going to need to perform any mathematical equations on the number, essentially they are functioning as strings (as far as I'm aware).

Perhaps it's counterproductive because now an order number cannot contain any other character besides a number - but that's anyhow how it works since it's using an INTEGER type in the database.
___
There's always the smaller and therefor faster response - since there's no `"`. 
<br>In the above example (minified) it's almost 17% smaller.
- string = 96 bytes
- int = 80 bytes