Glossary

Zod · Reference cheat sheet

📋 Overview

Alphabetical glossary of Zod schema, parsing, and type-inference terms.

🔧 Core concepts

Term	Definition
Coercion	Converting input types before validation (`z.coerce`).
Discriminated union	`z.discriminatedUnion` selecting a schema by a tag field.
Effect	Pipeline step such as transform, refine, or preprocess.
Infer	Extracting a TypeScript type from a schema (`z.infer`).
Issue	Single validation problem inside a `ZodError`.
Literal	Schema matching one exact value.
Parse	Validate and return data, throwing on failure.
Pipe	Connect schema output into another schema.
Refine	Custom predicate adding constraints beyond built-ins.
Safe parse	Non-throwing parse returning a result object.
Schema	Runtime validator object created by Zod builders.
Strip	Default object behavior removing unknown keys.
Transform	Map a validated value to a new output.
Tuple	Fixed-length array schema with per-index types.
ZodError	Error class aggregating validation issues.

💡 Examples

Discriminated union sketch:

const Event = z.discriminatedUnion("type", [
  z.object({ type: z.literal("click"), x: z.number() }),
  z.object({ type: z.literal("nav"), href: z.string() }),
]);

Result narrowing:

const r = Event.safeParse(input);
if (r.success) console.log(r.data.type);

⚠️ Pitfalls

Glossary terms may differ slightly across Zod major versions.
z.any() disables safety — prefer z.unknown() then narrow.

Glossary

Glossary

📋 Overview

🔧 Core concepts

💡 Examples

⚠️ Pitfalls

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