I’m saying it doesn’t matter to me what you use. My point is that I don’t care if you store it in strings or numbers, I thought you needed it as numbers (rational or otherwise), but you’ve chosen to store them as strings. All I’m saying is that if that works for you, that is fine.
OK. I see your point. For my purpose, only the string in its original form or the Fraction form of it are meaningful after the final conversion to rational forms:
In [1]: from fractions import Fraction
In [11]: repr('1/3')
Out[11]: "'1/3'"
In [12]: print('1/3')
1/3
In [13]: Fraction('1/3')
Out[13]: Fraction(1, 3)
In [14]: Fraction(1/3)
Out[14]: Fraction(6004799503160661, 18014398509481984)