WEI to ETHER conversion issue with Web3 and Javascript

Question

So i have a form where the user enters a price for an item in ETHER. I understand the blockchain does not handle floatin point numbers currently, so i am attempting to convert to WEI and store it on the block chain that way.

What im doing is the following

const price =.34 //this should be ether
const weiPrice = web3.toWei(cleanPrice, 'ether');
console.log('weiPrice', weiPrice);

output is weiPrice 340000000000000000, which is correct. I am then passing the variable weiPrice into the truffle-contract promise to create a new item.

   return contractInstance.createItem(
        Number(weiPrice),
        Number(cleanQuantity),
        Number(cleanQuantity), {
          from: account,
        })

Everything appears to work, but when i retrieve the value from the blockchain for this item i am getting the following result.

retrieved item

BigNumber {s: 1, e: 17, c: Array(1)}
c: [3400]
e: 17
s: 1__proto__: Object

I need to convert the price back to ether or wei but i guess i just dont understand whats happening here. Can anyone help me understand?

I tried the suggestions from the first couple of comments, here are the results.

console.log('test', item[0].c.valueOf());

output

test [3400]
 0: 3400
 length: 1
 __proto__: Array(0)


console.log('test2', item[0].c.toNumber());

output

Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: item[0].c.toNumber is not a function

Answer 1

Web3.js uses the BigNumber library since JavaScript does not do a good job handling large numbers correctly.

Take a look at the following examples on how you can recover the value you expect:

var val;
web3.eth.getBalance('0x90b0137bf6ddb130ed8e3f28cc9f929b0b609ed2', function (error, wei) { if (!error) { val = wei } })

val
> Object { s: 1, e: 17, c: (2) […] }

val.valueOf()
> "288295053265996304"

val.toNumber()
> 288295053265996300

val.toString()
> "288295053265996304"