I want to find “money” in a file and change the string
to float
, for example, I use regular expression to find “$33,326” and would like to change to [33326.0, “$”] (i.e., remove comma, $ sign and change to float
). I wrote the following function but it gives me an error
import locale,re def currencyToFloat(x): empty = [] reNum = re.compile(r"""(?P<prefix>$)?(?P<number>[.,0-9]+)(?P<suffix>s+[a-zA-Z]+)?""") new = reNum.findall(x) for i in new: i[1].replace(",", "") float(i[1]) empty.append(i[1]) empty.append(i[0]) return empty print currencyToFloat("$33,326")
Can you help me debug my code?
Advertisement
Answer
When you do
float(i[1])
you are not modifying anything. You should store the result in some variable, like:
temp = ...
But to cast to float
your number have to have a dot, not a comma, so you can do:
temp = i[1].replace(",", ".")
and then cast it to float and append to the list:
empty.append(float(temp))
Note:
Something important you should know is that when you loop through a list, like
for i in new:
i
is a copy of each element, so if you modify it, no changes will be done in the list new
. To modify the list you can iterate over the indices:
for i in range(len(new)): new[i] = ...