Is there a simple way to replace a comma with nothing?

Question

I'm trying to convert a string list into floats but this can't be done with a number like 1,234.56. Is there a way to use the string.replace() function to remove the comma so i just have 1234.56? string.replace(',','') doesn't seem to work. This is my current code:

fileName = (input("Enter the name of a file to count: "))
print()

infile = open(fileName, "r")
line = infile.read()
split = line.split()
for word in split:
    if word >= ".0":
        if word <= "9":
            add = (word.split())
            for num in add:
                  x = float(num)
                  print(x)

This is my error I'm getting:

File "countFile.py", line 29, in main x = float(num) ValueError: could not convert string to float: '3,236.789'

Answer 1

On a string you can replace any character, such as ,, like so:

s = "Hi, I'm a string"
s_new = s.replace(",", "")

---

Also, the comparisons you are doing on the strings may not always perform the way you expect. It may be better to cast to numeric values first. Something like:

for word in split:
    n = float(word.replace(",", ""))
    # do comparison on n, like
    # if n >= 0: ...

---

As a tip, try reading in your file with with:

# ...
with open(fileName, 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        # this will give you `line` as a string 
        # ending in '\n' (if it there is an endline)
        string_wo_commas = line.replace(",", "")
        # Do more stuff to the string, like cast to float and comparisons...

This is a more idiomatic way to read in a file and do something to each line.