The above wording implies that:

disconnectnode 1

Should work.. but the code below only supports:

disconnectnode "" 1

Suggest: making the code actually support

disconnectnode 1

Suggest: adding logic here to support trying to interpret request.params[0] as a node id if it is strictly a number and not an address. (See my other comment above)

Seems like a good suggestion.

We can't really do that as there is no way to figure out which is which.

Oh really? So that's not a computable problem at all and is one of those things that baffles computer science? Well then it that's the case sign me up for a nobel prize because I have a solution. :p

Suggest: if it contains non-numeric characters, it's an address. If not, it's a nodeid. Use the C90 standard function

isdigit()

in a loop, if you must.

Granted, that assumes network addresses will never be simply numeric. But since we only support IPv4, IPv6, and tor networks, that's an ok assumption. If some day networks evolve to which addresses are just raw numbers: In that case, users can also do "" nodeid as a 'workaround'.

I don't think it is a good idea to second guess what it given and I don't think it is a good idea to have a different API than core has unless there is a very good reason to.

Yes you can make a best guess as to what the user intended. No this isn't a good idea.

Yes i agree that the API is a bit silly. However, the API is very lax in general (we saw that on another diff, where the amount could be a string or a number). Doing second guessing in these condition is dangerous IMO.

As things goes along I do think it make sense to straighten the API instead of doing all kind of second guesses.

IMO the best here should be to take a sting plus a another argument. The string would be "ip" or "nodeid". Obviously, that's breaking the API, so that would need to be considered carefully.