How to convert a string to a number if it has commas in it as thousands separators?

user_118973 0
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I have a string that represents a number which uses commas to separate thousands. How can I convert this to a number in python?

>>> int("1,000,000")

Generates a ValueError.

I could replace the commas with empty strings before I try to convert it, but that feels wrong somehow. Is there a better way?

python
10 Answers

A little late, but the babel library has parse_decimal and parse_number which do exactly what you want:

from babel.numbers import parse_decimal, parse_number
parse_decimal('10,3453', locale='es_ES')
>>> Decimal('10.3453')
parse_number('20.457', locale='es_ES')
>>> 20457
parse_decimal('10,3453', locale='es_MX')
>>> Decimal('103453')

You can also pass a Locale class instead of a string:

from babel import Locale
parse_decimal('10,3453', locale=Locale('es_MX'))
>>> Decimal('103453')
user_111675180

If you're using pandas and you're trying to parse a CSV that includes numbers with a comma for thousands separators, you can just pass the keyword argument thousands=',' like so:

df = pd.read_csv('your_file.csv', thousands=',')
user_9001300
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