Solving JSON encoding issues when handling numbers

redenumifying.pl

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use JSON;

my $number = 3.5;
my $string = 3.5;

# whoops: stringified a number
say "logging the string: $string";

# outputs {"number":3.5,"string":"3.5"}
say encode_json({ number => $number, string => $string });

# fix: numify the string back into a number
$string *= 1;

# outputs {"number":3.5,"string":3.5}
say encode_json({ number => $number, string => $string });