Evaluating a mathematical expression in a string

Question

stringExp = \"2^4\"
intVal = int(stringExp)      # Expected value: 16

This returns the following error:

Traceback (most recent call         


        

Answer 1

This is a massively late reply, but I think useful for future reference. Rather than write your own math parser (although the pyparsing example above is great) you could use SymPy. I don't have a lot of experience with it, but it contains a much more powerful math engine than anyone is likely to write for a specific application and the basic expression evaluation is very easy:

>>> import sympy
>>> x, y, z = sympy.symbols('x y z')
>>> sympy.sympify("x**3 + sin(y)").evalf(subs={x:1, y:-3})
0.858879991940133

Very cool indeed! A from sympy import * brings in a lot more function support, such as trig functions, special functions, etc., but I've avoided that here to show what's coming from where.