Question

I have a bunch of numbers that are in string format,I would like some ideas on a function to format these.

ex.

input 00000000.00 – should output 0.00

input 00000123.00 – should output 123.00

input 0000-123.00 – should output -123.00

input 00-00123.45 – should output -123.45

input -0000123.00 – should output -123.00

input 00000000.-5 – should output -0.05

input 0000000-.25 – should output -0.25

one soultion that I can think for strings containing negative sign is as follows
ex.
num = “0000-123.00”

if num.find("-") != -1:

    num = "-" + num.replace("-","")

this will give me num as -0000123.00 but I am not sure how to get rid of leading zeros.

Answer 1

You can parse the number like so:

def parse_funky_numstring(s):
    neg = s.count('-') % 2
    s = s.replace('-', '0')
    num = float(s)
    return -num if neg else num

then format it using Python’s string formatting,

num = "{:0.2f}".format(parse_funky_numstring(s))