This looks like a behavior change: not sure it qualifies as a new feature. It's either a bug fix or a potential BC break to me.

@nicolas-grekas Yes i understand.

What do you think if i created a new context key TYPE_CAST_NODES to true value
to enable this ?

Update to add in same way the null cast.

XML example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<response>
  <foo/>
</response>

Currently:

array(2) {
  ["foo"]=>
  string(0) ""
}

expected

array(2) {
  ["foo"]=>
 null
}

I would rather change validateAndDenormalize to accept casting strings to int|float when a numeric string is encountered. Can you please have a look ?

Any news here?

@nicolas-grekas Hello, Sorry for answer time.
I have speak with @dunglas about it before start.
I have copied the operation already put in other encoder.
Here you want to change on normalisation for whatever the encoder, I'm a little afraid of breaking something else

I think I'm 👎 here: this is not the proper place to do this. Instead, the casting logic should happen in the code that uses the resulting array to hydrate the target structure - by looking at the metadata of the target structure (as suggested in api-platform/core#3192)

Let's close then.