How do I convert a currency string to a floating point number in Python?

Question

I have some strings representing numbers with specific currency format, for example:

money="$6,150,593.22" 

I want to convert this string into the number

6150593.22 

What is the best way to achieve this?

Answer 1

Try this:

from re import sub from decimal import Decimal  money = '$6,150,593.22' value = Decimal(sub(r'[^\d.]', '', money)) 

This has some advantages since it uses Decimal instead of float (which is better for representing currency) and it also avoids any locale issues by not hard-coding a specific currency symbol.