LdValue.ToString() unexpectedly wraps string values

[cfauchere]

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Describe the bug With string values calling LdValue.ToString() wraps the string with double quotes.

To reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior.

LdValue.Of("hello").ToString()
// "\"hello\"

LdValue.Of("hello").AsString
// "hello"

Expected behavior Expected behavior: ToString() does not wrap the string but return the string itself (like AsString does)

SDK version

Language version, developer tools C# .Net5

OS/platform Widnows 10

[eli-darkly]

As the API documentation says, .ToString() for this type returns the JSON encoding of the value. It is equivalent to .ToJsonString(). If you want the string value as a string, use AsString which is specifically for that purpose.

The rationale for ToString() behaving differently from AsString() is that it is common to use ToString() in debugging/logging where you simply want a quick way to see a printable representation of the value— and LdValue is, by definition, a JSON value that can be of any JSON type, so it is desirable to be able to distinguish the numeric value 123 from the string "123" as those are not the same thing in JSON. And, in the context of the LaunchDarkly SDKs where this type is used, that is an important distinction— the variation values of a feature flag could be numbers, strings, booleans, etc. and those can't be used interchangeably.