title: Can I losslessly recover integer keys which json.dumps() has converted to strings?
body: <p>Consider this snippet:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import json
  &gt;&gt;&gt; a = {1:'1'}
  &gt;&gt;&gt; json_a = json.dumps(a)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; json.loads(json_a)
  {'1': '1'}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My attempt was to pass a  Python dict to <code>json.dumps()</code>, and then use <code>json.loads()</code> to get it back. But that doesn't happen, probably because JSON alays considers keys as strings. </p>
  
  <p>Is there any other way I can retain the original key types? </p>