Question

Hi I have an script that look for information and the information is suppose to be integers, but sometime I find a empty string and because of that I get the following error:

ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: ''

I was trying to do the following, but it does not work.

list = ['12', '14', '45', ''] 

for i in list:
    if '' in i:
        i = 0
        i
    else:
        i

This will match everything. It got to be another way and there is no way I can edit the source. Thanks

Answer 1

Don’t use list as a variable name. Sooner or later you will want to use the builting list and get strange bugs 🙂

my_list = ['12', '14', '45', ''] 

for i in my_list:
    if not i:
        # i is empty string
    else:
        # ...

I guess the error you have shown is from elsewhere where you are trying to use int(i)

If i is supposed to be converted to an int, one way to do it is like this

for i in my_list:
    if not i:
        i = 0
    else:
        i = int(i)

Another way is to use an exception handler

for i in my_list:
    try:
        i = int(i)
    except ValueError:
        i = 0