Thank you both for your timely reply. The code suggested does solve the conversion problem.

Neither the actions.yml file nor the repository variable has an explicit typing system, let alone type conversion. 🤡

YAML does have a type system. For example, a is a number and b a string:

a: 5
b: '5'

What I suspect is that they only tested with numeric literals and didn't consider that anyone using Actions substitutions would end up creating a string (because to the YAML parser ${{ vars.TIMEOUT }} is a string, not a number, and so are the vars items) that might need to be converted to a number after variable substitution. Fun!

Might be worth a bug report, in case the staff members around here miss this (to me) highly entertaining thread. 😅

There's plenty of weirdness to YAML without mixing in Actions, though. I'll just leave this link here: The yaml document from hell 😸

Ran into a similar issue and had to workaround this by coercing the type to a string, only to be later converted back to a number in our scripts.

Was a bug ever reported for this issue?