Looking for an universal way to parse price into decimal

Question

I'm working on a project where I have to parse prices. I have to take into account different formats of prices.

Problems:

US citizens write prices this way: 1,000.00

EU this way: 1.000,00

This very problem could be solved splitting string using commas and dots so the last item in the list would be cents. The problem is that sometimes people doesn't write cents at all so somebody could write 1.000 EUR for example.

And there are other problems... sometimes people don't write dots at all.

Do you know some python module or function which could solve this problem and return decimal.Decimal of the price? I don't care about currency.

EDIT: Assume that I will have thousands of prices in such formats.

Answer 1

This code uses this logic:

• if no '.' or ',' are present, just convert to float

• else if ',' or '.' are the 3rd character from the end, then this is the decimal character:

  . strip then non-decimal character, change the decimal char to '.' if necessary, then convert to float

• else

  . there is no decimal part given, just strip all ',' and '.' and convert to float

This code is very dependent on getting valid strings - invalid strings like "1,2,3.000" or "1..." will give erroneous values.

def parse_price(s):
    if '.' not in s and ',' not in s:
        return float(s)

    elif s[-3] in ',.':
        dec_char = s[-3]
        sep_char = {'.': ',', ',':'.'}[dec_char]
        s = s.replace(sep_char, '')
        s = s.replace(',', '.')
        return float(s)

    else:
        s = s.replace(',','').replace('.', '')
        return float(s)

tests = """\
1.000
1.000,20
23.14
1,234
1.23
3,12
""".splitlines()
for test in tests:
    print(test, '->', parse_price(test))

gives

1.000 -> 1000.0
1.000,20 -> 1000.2
23.14 -> 23.14
1,234 -> 1234.0
1.23 -> 1.23
3,12 -> 3.12

Answer 2

Use price-parser:

>>> from price_parser import parse_price
>>> parse_price('1,000.00')
Price(amount=Decimal('1000.00'), currency=None)
>>> parse_price('1.000,00')
Price(amount=Decimal('1000.00'), currency=None)