Remove double quotes enclosing numbers using regex

Question

I'm working with the following string:

'"name": "Gnosis", \n        "symbol": "GNO", \n        "rank": "99", \n        "price_usd": "175.029", \n        "price_btc": "0.0186887", \n        "24h_volume_usd": "753877.0"'

and I have to use re.sub() in python to replace only the double quotes (") that are enclosing the numbers, in order to parse it later in JSON. I've tried with some regular expressions, but without success. Here is my best attempt:

exp = re.compile(r': (")\D+\.*\D*(")', re.MULTILINE)
response = re.sub(exp, "", string)

I've searched a lot for a similar problem, but have not found another similar question.

EDIT:

Finally I've used (thanks to S. Kablar):

fomatted = re.sub(r'"(-*\d+(?:\.\d+)?)"', r"\1", string)
parsed = json.loads(formatted)

The problem is that this endpoint returns a bad formatted string as JSON.

Other users answered "Parse the string first with json, and later convert numbers to float" with a for loop and, I think, is a very inneficient way to do it, also, you will be forced to select between int or float type for your response. To get out of doubt, I've wrote this gist where I show you the comparations between the different approachs with benchmarking, and for now I'm going to trust in regex in this case.

Thanks everyone for your help

Answer 1

Regex: "(-?\d+(?:[\.,]\d+)?)" Substitution: \1

Details:

• () Capturing group
• (?:) Non capturing group
• \d Matches a digit (equal to [0-9])
• + Matches between one and unlimited times
• ? Matches between zero and one times
• \1 Group 1.

Python code:

def remove_quotes(text):
    return re.sub(r"\"(-?\d+(?:[\.,]\d+)?)\"", r'\1', text)

remove_quotes('"percent_change_7d": "-23.43"') >> "percent_change_7d": -23.43

Answer 2

Parse the string first with json, and later convert numbers to floats:

string = '{"name": "Gnosis", \n        "symbol": "GNO", \n        "rank": "99", \n        "price_usd": "175.029", \n        "price_btc": "0.0186887", \n        "24h_volume_usd": "753877.0"}'

data = json.loads(string)
response = {}
for key, value in data.items():
    try:
        value = int(value) if value.strip().isdigit() else float(value)
    except ValueError:
        pass
    response[key] = value