How to force int to string in Laravel JSON?

There is a way to cast integer into string in laravel

in your model you can cast id to string. Its as follows

protected $casts = [ 'id' => 'string' ];

But the downside is that you would have to do that for all Models.

If you don't want to modify a lot of code you could run response data through a quick and dirty function. Instead of going directory to JSON you should instead grab the data as a nested array. Then put it through a function like this:

function convertIntToString ($myArray) {
    foreach ($myArray as $thisKey => $thisValue) {
        if (is_array($thisValue)) {
            // recurse to handle a nested array
            $myArray[$thisKey] = convertIntToString($thisValue);
        } elseif (is_integer($thisValue)) {
            // convert any integers to a string
            $myArray[$thisKey] = (string) $thisValue;
        }
    }
    return $myArray;
}

The function will convert integers to strings and use recursion to handle nested arrays. Take the output from that and then convert it to JSON.

The best solution for me is to to use attribute casting and Fractal transformers

Fractal transformers are extremely useful when you have complex responses with multiple relations included.

You can typecast it to string:

return response->json(["data" => (string)1]);