Eric Smith wrote:
The current behavior should go nowhere; it is not useful. Something very similar to the current behavior (but done correctly) should go into the locale module.
I agree with everything Martin says here. I think the basic premise is: you won't find strings "in the wild" that use non-ASCII digits but do use the ASCII dot as a decimal point. And that's what float() is looking for. (And that doesn't even begin to address what it expects for an exponent 'e'.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark "In China, comma and space are used to mark digit groups because dot is used as decimal mark." Note that float() can also parse integers, it just returns them as floats :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Dec 02 2010)
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