getBlock() returns difficulty null

[ayushch80]

Ethers Version

5.2

Search Terms

Blocks Methods, Providers

Describe the Problem

getBlock() and getBlockWithTransactions() are returning difficulty : null but if I tried same code snippet from your documentation https://docs.ethers.io/v5/api/providers/provider/#Provider-getBlock it returns correct difficulty: 3849295379889

Code Snippet

await provider.getBlock(15077324)

Contract ABI

No response

Errors

No response

Environment

Ethereum (mainnet/ropsten/rinkeby/goerli), Browser (Chrome, Safari, etc)

Environment (Other)

No response

[BlackBoxEngineering]

The example in the documentation is correct for the following block on chain 1

await provider.getBlock(100004)
// _difficulty: { BigNumber: "3849295379889" },
// difficulty: 3849295379889,

[BlackBoxEngineering]

getBlock() Fine too bud.

async function f_lookupGetBlockDiff( _blockno ){
    provider = new ethers.providers.Web3Provider( window.ethereum );
    const blockNo = await provider.getBlock( _blockno );
    return blockNo.difficulty;
}
f_lookupGetBlockDiff(100004);

[ayushch80]

[ayushch80]

The example in the documentation is correct for the following block on chain 1

await provider.getBlock(100004) // _difficulty: { BigNumber: "3849295379889" }, // difficulty: 3849295379889,

it's not about example in docs
I tried some other valid block numbers

[BlackBoxEngineering]

Sorry, I understand now you have shown another example:

I too am receiving null for that block (15077324), and can see it has a large difficulty 11,849,458,542,468,467 in eth explorer

I did try your block number again and it returns a difficultly no problem. I checked 15077300 too 15077400 and got all the difficulties returned

Can you check that block number again 15077324 ?

[BlackBoxEngineering]

Has this suddenly and magically been fixed, because I did also return a null like ayushch80 for 15077324 originally

[ayushch80]

@Ancientzero
I tried again but didn't got any
Can you pls share the piece of code you tried

[ayushch80]

i made some calculations and found that we are getting difficulty : null after block number 13199441

[ricmoo]

The difficulty is a number in JavaScript, which means that once the difficulty exceeded 53 bits, it becomes null. The _difficulty is a BigNumber which allows for arbitrary values, and for applications that require access to difficulty, that property should be used.

In v6, difficulty is a BigInt.

See #2036 for more details.

Make sense?