Normalize BigNumber to string for output

[the-flagship]

Before:

{
  id: '0x123abc...',
  owner: '0x456def...',
  name: 'foo',
  email: '[email protected]',
  escrow: BigNumber { _hex: '0x0544ed520394774822', _isBigNumber: true },
  reserve: BigNumber { _hex: '0x3782dace9d900000', _isBigNumber: true },
  content: 'https://...',
  checksum: '0xdeadbeef...'
}

After:

{
  id: '0x123abc...',
  owner: '0x456def...',
  name: 'foo',
  email: '[email protected]',
  escrow: '90.0',
  reserve: '4.0',
  content: 'https://...',
  checksum: '0xdeadbeef...'
}

[the-masthead]

I'd take this further by doing this:

const floatThreshold = parseUnits("1", 18);
if (r[k].gte(floatThreshold)) {
  return [k, formatUnits(r[k], 18)];
}

[the-flagship]

Does this do what you want?

function normalizeBigNumber(n: BigNumber): number | string {
  try {
    return n.toNumber();
  } catch {
    return formatUnits(n, 18);
  }
}

[the-flagship]

Edited the above since I didn't actually understand what formatUnits was doing...

[the-masthead]

This will overflow. 1.0 tokens = 1^18 bignumber.

[the-masthead]

The edited version should work.

[the-flagship]

Does it accomplish the goal of your original comment? I think maybe we should just always return formatUnits(n, 18)... not the best ergonomics to sometimes have a number in these fields and sometimes strings.

[the-masthead]

It works, but you can't apply it unconditionally to all bignumbers since some of them aren't fractional (e.g. 1 == 1, but 1.0 = 1^18).

[the-flagship]

Okay, how about 5e1fa71?

[the-masthead]

Now that I think of it, I like the version with try+toNumber even better because it'll also work for values <1 (and should still have no false positives).

[the-flagship]

Okay, a8c333d has try/catch with .toNumber().toString()