How do I convert Unicode to an integer value and not raise an exception if the text is not really an integer

Question

I have some HTML I am trying to parse. There are cases where the html attributes alone are not going to help me identify the row type (header versus data). Fortunately, if my row is a data row then it should have some values that can be converted to integers. I have figured out how to convert the unicode to an integer for those cases that it is possible to make the conversion. I am struggling to write the logic to move past the cells that the conversion will not work because the cell has content that must be treated as text.

for example if rowColumn[1][3] can be converted to an integer I can do so by

int(rowColumn[1][3].replace(',','').strip('$'))

but I get an error if rowColumn[1][3] has text content.

Answer 1

Have you looked at the try statement?

try:
    x = int(rowColumn[1][3].replace(',','').strip('$'))
except ValueError, e:
    x = None # rowColumn[1][3] was not an integer