@Richard I suggest you open a new thread to discuss support for dumping `Decimal` as a number in JSON. I agree that allowing arbitrary strings to be inserted in the JSON is not a good idea, but apart from the `Decimal` issue I can't think of any other case that can't be solved via `JSONEncoder.decode`. However there is an asymmetry with respect to parsing / dumping numbers. The JSON specs don't limit numbers to any precision and the `json` module can parse numbers of arbitrary precision. Python further supports arbitrary precision through `Decimal` but any JSON dump is limited to the underlying binary `float` representation. As the OP indicates one can parse `0.6441726684570313` to `Decimal` (preserving the precision) but there's not way to dump it back. This seems like a limitation of the `json` implementation. For dumping `Decimal` without importing the `decimal` module, since this type seems to be the only exception, can't we just dump any non-default type as `str(o)` and check whether it can be parsed back to float: # if not any of the default types dump_val = str(o) try: float(dump_val) except ValueError: raise TypeError('... is not JSON serializable') from None