dealing with null (nil) values in nim

I’ve been messing around with nim for a little bit, and, for the most part, I quite like it. (I’m back to hating go again for how verbose it is… don’t ask)

The only (minor) complaint that I have is that the language is, at times, poorly documentented (again, I have to say… could be a me problem).

Here’s what I was trying to do:

I wanted to fetch some JSON from a weather API. To use JSON in a way that makes nim happy, you first have to unmarshal the data, which means specifying the field names and their respective types beforehand. But I quickly ran into a problem: the field I was trying to pick could be either a float type or null (I suppose the equivalent in nim is nil). I tried using an enum, but, that didn’t work (I was met with some error about Jstrings). Anyway, it turns out that what you really want to do is use an option type when there’s the possibility of something being nil (or maybe there’s some other way, idk. This is what I found to work).

type
    Daily = object
    precipitation_probability_mean: seq[Option[int]]

And then try to unpack it:

try:
    forecast.daily.precipitation_probability_mean[idx].get() 
    # other code
except UnpackDefect:
    discard