For Python, I prefer decimal.Decimal[1]. When you serialize, you can either convert it to a string (and then have your deserializer know the field type and auto

For Python, I prefer decimal.Decimal[1]. When you serialize, you can either convert it to a string (and then have your deserializer know the field type and automatically encode it back into a decimal) OR just agree all numeric values can only be ints or decimals. You can pass parse_float=decimal.Decimal to json.loads[2] to make this easier. My most obnoxious and spicy programming take is that ints an decimals should be built-in and floats should require imports. I understand why though: Decimal encoding isn't anywhere near as standardized as other numeric types like integers or floating-point numbers. [1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html [2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html