Parse table with booleans and numbers

[JavierLealCortes]

This PR allows to convert an arbitrary table to a string without losing type information.
Booleans are codified with special ASCII values and numeric values are codified as a string.
When a string value needs to be decodified, it will try to decode as a number first. If it's not a numeric value then it will be treated as a string.

The only caveat is that strings that represent numeric values would be mistakenly assigned to numeric values

[ridgekuhn]

@JavierLealCortes Just wanted to say thanks for this PR, I think it's exactly what I need for my project! Also, thank you @benwiley4000! I'm surprised this repo hasn't gotten more attention!

[benwiley4000]

Sorry, just saw this. I'm hesitant about the caveat. Do you think there's any workaround that isn't too complicated to avoid casting strings to numbers? I'll admit my use case was for serializing string tables.

[ridgekuhn]

You could probably just remove the call to parse() on the right-hand side of the assignment? (Also, is it necessary to use tonum() to access the table key anyway? I think Lua will coerce the type for you in that case?)

imo, as written, it's not a big caveat since tonum() returns falsy for anything w a non-numeric char and parse() would proceed to return the NaN value as a string. The only time I can think of that it would cause an issue would be if you tried to concatenate a number from the table without using tostr() on it first, which seems like an edge-case since I think you'd generally want/expect to treat any value containing only numeric chars as a number rather than a string?

[ridgekuhn]

btw, this branch was battle-tested through 90% of development for Downstream Dream. In the end, I wrote my own alternative that uses less characters to serialize the table to stay under the compressed limit (at the cost of more tokens to deserialize), but I had no issues with this branch otherwise!