strings (dollar.cents) into floats

[Ben Finney]

luca bertini <luca.bertini at email.it> writes:

> i have strings which look like money values (ie 34.45)
> is there a way to convert them into float variables?

You most likely do *not* want floating-point numbers for currency,
since they rely on the operating system's binary floating point
support which cannot accurately represent decimal fractions.

    >>> float("34.45")
    34.450000000000003


Use the arbitrary-precision decimal.Decimal type instead.

    >>> from decimal import Decimal
    >>> Decimal("34.45")
    Decimal("34.45")

They support the full range of arithmetic operations, without
cumulative precision errors that floats are prone to.

-- 
 \          "As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of |
  `\   flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, |
_o__) and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint."  -- Jack Handey |
Ben Finney