Dealing with floating point values and JSON

Since there's no support for floating point data types in nxlog, given a log entry that contains numbers with decimal points, is the best option to convert them to fixed point integers? For example, given a field $value = "123.45" (a string) extracted from a log line using regex or xm_kvp, if I go directly to_json, I end up with a string in JSON.

I don't see any way to put the value, without quotes, into JSON. Am I correct?

One workaround is to convert the value to a fixed point integer, choosing a specific precision. For example, if I were to choose to always store my values * 100, I could do the following:

if $value =~ /^(-)?([0-9]+)\.?([0-9]+)?$/
{
  if not defined($3) or size($3) == 0 $value = integer($2) * 100;
  else if size($3) == 1 $value = integer($2) * 100 + integer($3) * 10;
  else $value = integer($2) * 100 + integer(substr($3,0,2));
  if $1 == '-' $value = $value * -1;
}

Given $value = "123.45", "123", "123.4567", "123.4", or "123.", this code will assign the correct, 2-place integer value.

Is this the best current approach to converting a string representation of a floating point value to something that will result in a non-quoted value in JSON?

Thank you!