Fix yargs parsing string arguments as numbers

[t1m0thyj]

TL;DR Yargs parses string arguments as numbers if they look like numbers, which may be unexpected behavior for methods that expect string values.

After seeing the context of #1883, I think I understand why 🙂 It seems like the default behavior of the yargs parser is to parse any options that look like numbers as numbers (source). This is undesirable behavior for jobid which should be parsed as a string regardless of whether a user enters it in the format JOB1234 or just 1234. Is this correct?

The solution in this PR will fix the issue for this command and any command handlers that call toBeDefinedAndNonBlank. But I wonder if there are any other places where we may hit a similar issue if command handlers call other methods that are expecting a string and receive a number instead.

I am ok with approving this PR as-is if we believe it is the best solution. Alternatively, the behavior of yargs could be overridden (see here) to only parse options of type number as numbers and never parse items of type string. I don't know if we would consider that a bug fix, or a potentially risky breaking change?

Originally posted by @t1m0thyj in zowe/imperative#857 (review)

[t1m0thyj]

This issue can happen with the --encoding option as well, when the IBM- prefix is missing (e.g. 939 instead of IBM-939):

When trying to run
zowe jobs view spool-file-by-id [jobid] [spoolFileId]
I get this error message:

Unexpected Command Error:
Please review the message and stack below.
Contact the creator of handler:
"/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/lib/zosjobs/view/spool-file-by-id/SpoolFileById.handler"
Message:
encoding.trim is not a function
Stack:
TypeError: encoding.trim is not a function
    at GetJobs.<anonymous> (/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/node_modules/@zowe/zos-jobs-for-zowe-sdk/lib/GetJobs.js:405:38)
    at Generator.next (<anonymous>)
    at /usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/node_modules/@zowe/zos-jobs-for-zowe-sdk/lib/GetJobs.js:18:71
    at new Promise (<anonymous>)
    at __awaiter (/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/node_modules/@zowe/zos-jobs-for-zowe-sdk/lib/GetJobs.js:14:12)
    at GetJobs.getSpoolContentById (/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/node_modules/@zowe/zos-jobs-for-zowe-sdk/lib/GetJobs.js:398:16)
    at SpoolFileByIdHandler.<anonymous> (/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/lib/zosjobs/view/spool-file-by-id/SpoolFileById.handler.js:41:67)
    at Generator.next (<anonymous>)
    at fulfilled (/usr/local/node-v20.15.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules/@zowe/cli/lib/zosjobs/view/spool-file-by-id/SpoolFileById.handler.js:15:58)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)

This is on a server. It works on my machine 😀
How can I fix this?
Node version: v20.15.0
Zowe version: 7.28.2

https://openmainframeproject.slack.com/archives/CC8AALGN6/p1722846168243069

[t1m0thyj]

Tried setting the yargs parser configuration in YargsConfigurer.ts:

yargs.parserConfiguration({
  "parse-numbers": false,
  "parse-positional-numbers": false
})

This prevents numbers from being parsed at all, even for args of type number. It seems that yargs is unable to smartly determine whether an argument should be parsed as a number or not, so we may need to add such logic ourselves.

[traeok]

yargs has a coerce function that allows you to specify the coercion function for specific keys. I haven't used yargs much but it might be useful for resolving the string/number parsing issue - we could programmatically filter the list of args based on type and then override yargs behavior to attempt parsing those args as numeric. But depending on how yargs is used within the CLI, we might not be able to do this without pre-fetching all the numeric arguments ahead of time.

[t1m0thyj]

I like the idea of the yargs coerce function - we should investigate this, although not sure if we'll be able to access the command definition from within the coercion function to determine what type of argument is being parsed. If not, we may need to parse the arguments ourselves in the Imperative CommandProcessor.