CakePHP 2.x JSON views are encoding numbers as strings
<p>Is there a way to get CakePHP 2.8 JSON views to encode numbers as numbers instead of strings? </p>

<p>I would like to avoid creating <code>/json/*.ctp</code> view files with <code>echo json_encode($data, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK)</code> if at all possible and have the standard <code>_serialize</code> method below encode numbers properly by default.</p>

<pre><code>public function index(){
    $items = $this-&gt;Paginator-&gt;paginate();

     $this-&gt;set(array(
        'items' =&gt; $items,
        '_serialize' =&gt; array('items')
    ));
}
</code></pre>