Add concerte type for JsonPrimitives

What is your use-case and why do you need this feature?

I found its very complex when I try to parse the json string when the type is unknown, for example, I cannot decode json to Map<String, Any?> except Map<String, JsonElement>, because I shouldn’t expose JsonElement to caller, so I try to parse them manually and I cannot get real type of JsonPrimitive, the Api only provide some converter method and isString to determine whether it is a String, even if I can detect and parse the string to real type just like Int, Float, Boolean … it’s not very convenient.

Describe the solution you’d like

add a way to determine the real type of JsonPrimitive or just parse them as Any like other json parse library.

[gnawf]

Just ran into this problem. I am parsing user input in the form of String to JsonElement to put as JWT claims (for a HTTP Client). I need to put Kotlin/Java primitives i.e. Int, String, Double, Map, List as arguments into the claims object.

This is a solved problem in Gson and Jackson but I was hoping to use a Kotlin 1st solution for sealed classes etc… Guess not.

[sandwwraith]

However, it is still possible to handle booleans there separately, so users can easily differentiate whether it is String, Boolean, Null, or Number. While we still do not aim to provide a number-parsing strategy, differentiating of booleans may help in some use-cases