javascript - How to decode encodeURIComponent in PHP without integers turning into strings

In my Javascript code, I form my query like so:

    let query = "needleKey=" + encodeURIComponent(needle.key)
    query += "&needleValue=" + encodeURIComponent(needle.value);
    query += "&newData=" + encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(newData));

    fetch(API, {
        method: 'POST',
        headers: new Headers({
            'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded', // <-- Specifying the Content-Type
        }),
        body: query
    })
        .then(handleErrors)
        .then(response => {
            resolve(response.text());
        })
        .catch(err => {
            console.error("ERR: Error fetching " + API + query + "\n" + err);
            reject(err);
        });
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I collect this on the back end with the PHP code:

if (isset($_REQUEST['needleKey']) && isset($_REQUEST['needleValue'])) {
    $needleKey = $_REQUEST['needleKey'];
    $needleValue = $_REQUEST['needleValue'];
    
    $filter = [$needleKey => $needleValue];
} else {
    echo "ERR: No needle passed to DB server.";
    return;
}
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My issue is that ifneedle.value in the javascript code is a integer (ie:1234) it ends up as the string'1234' in the PHP code. I have tried converting the string to an int in PHP (and it works) but I don't want to blindly convert ALLneedleValues to integers because I have occasion where I want to be able to pass a number as a string.

I tried adding rawurldecode to the php code to no success. I've also tried a few different ways of forming the query in javascript, to no avail.

How can I pass a number from javascript to PHP and have it stay a number?

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