Why do int keys of a python dict turn into strings when using json.dumps?

The simple reason is that JSON does not allow integer keys.

object
    {}
    { members } 
members
    pair
    pair , members
pair
    string : value  # Keys *must* be strings.

As to how to get around this limitation - you will first need to ensure that the receiving implementation can handle the technically-invalid JSON. Then you can either replace all of the quote marks or use a custom serializer.

If you really want to, you can check keys for being convertable to integers again using:

def pythonify(json_data):
    for key, value in json_data.iteritems():
        if isinstance(value, list):
            value = [ pythonify(item) if isinstance(item, dict) else item for item in value ]
        elif isinstance(value, dict):
            value = pythonify(value)
        try:
            newkey = int(key)
            del json_data[key]
            key = newkey
        except TypeError:
            pass
        json_data[key] = value
    return json_data