Extracting numerical value from Python Decimal

Question

When I use the python Decimal object simply with something like:

from decimal import *
dec = Decimal('3.432')
print dec

it will print 3.432, just like I want, but if i try to put that same value dec into a json object what I get in the json is Decimal("3.432"). How can I just get the numerical value from decimal?

Answer 1

>>> str(decimal.Decimal('3.1'))
'3.1'

Out-of-the-box JSON uses a few primitive types, like strings, heavily.

Your best bet is to convert your Decimals to strings when creating your JSON document from some Python object.

Convert the strings back to Decimal when converting the JSON document back to a Python object.