Removing redundant symbols from string

Question

Let's say I have a string like that: '12,423,343.93'. How to convert it to float in simple, effective and yet elegant way?

It seems I need to remove redundant commas from the string and then call float(), but I have no good solution for that.

Thanks

Answer 1

s = "12,423,343.93"
f = float(s.replace(",", ""))

Answer 2

Note that the seperator symbols used vary from country to country. In some cultures, "." is used to seperate groups, and "," indicates a decimal point for instance. If you're parsing user-entered strings like this, it may be better to use the locale module instead. For example:

>>> import locale
>>> locale.atof('12,423,343.93')  # No locale set yet, so this will refuse to parse
ValueError: invalid literal for float(): 12,423,343.93   

>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, "en_GB")  # Use a UK locale.
>>> locale.atof('12,423,343.93')
12423343.93