Question

I want only the number here which is in scientific notation. The output below is the Python interpreter output from Terminal. How would one go about this.

Added info: the string isn’t always the same length so no char. length shortcuts… The suffix is also not always the same.

>>> x
[' 1.9580000000000002E-05\xef\xbb\xbf\r\n']
>>> x[0].split('\\')
[' 1.9580000000000002E-05\xef\xbb\xbf\r\n']
>>>

Desired output:

1.9580000000000002E-05

Answer 1

>>> import re
>>> x = [' 1.9580000000000002E-05\xef\xbb\xbf\r\n']
>>> float(re.search(r'\d\.\d*E[+-]\d+',x[0]).group())
1.9580000000000002e-05

But, depending on the encoding of your text and where you get that data from, this is possibly more “correct”:

>>> float(x[0].decode('utf8').encode('ascii', 'ignore').strip())
1.9580000000000002e-05