Spatial plus sign fix

[btylerburton]

Pull Request

Related to https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/issues/3549

About

PR TASKS

• [X] The actual code changes.
• [X] Tests written and passed.
• [X] Any changes to docs?
• [X] Bumped version number in setup.py (also checked on PyPi).

[nickumia-reisys]

How does removing the + make this work now? What about - signs?

[jbrown-xentity]

How does removing the + make this work now? What about - signs?

We found that our code wasn't handling + signs correctly, although the - are required for negative lat/long values. The + is pretty atypical (and is definitely not a part of the geojson spec, which expects an actual JSON number type), but it's way easier for us to handle this use case than to try to get the data providers to change how they are providing the data...

[nickumia-reisys]

How does removing the + make this work now? What about - signs?

We found that our code wasn't handling + signs correctly, although the - are required for negative lat/long values. The + is pretty atypical (and is definitely not a part of the geojson spec, which expects an actual JSON number type), but it's way easier for us to handle this use case than to try to get the data providers to change how they are providing the data...

That makes sense. You're saying that whatever library couldn't convert the string "+23" to the number 23. Okay.. There weren't any other issues with format parsing? It seems like this fix is one that should be handled differently. I think the problem stems from there not being a spec about this. But it should be a validation error and if we want to allow it anyway, there should be a connection between the validation failing and it entering this logic. But that's definitely out of the scope of this effort...

[btylerburton]

Some further edification from the spec: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26667313/does-json-allow-positive-sign-for-numbers

[nickumia-reisys]

For clarity, the internal variable in the translate_spatial function was never actually modifying the true "old_spatial" variable. The change of naming helps to highlight that, so overall, great reviewing, but there was no functionality at stake.