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

Question

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         


        

Answer 1

I tried this. It goes a bit beyond the question: You get an input. It will be converted to string first (if it is a list, for example from Beautiful soup); then to int, then to float.

It goes as far as it can get. In worst case, it returns everything unconverted as string.

def to_normal(soupCell):
''' converts a html cell from beautiful soup to text, then to int, then to float: as far as it gets.
US thousands separators are taken into account.
needs import locale'''

locale.setlocale( locale.LC_ALL, 'english_USA' ) 

output = unicode(soupCell.findAll(text=True)[0].string)
try: 
    return locale.atoi(output)
except ValueError: 
    try: return locale.atof(output)
    except ValueError:
        return output