Question

I’d like convert strings to floats using Python 2.6 and later, but without silently converting things like 'NaN' and 'Inf' to float objects. I do want them to be silently ignored, as with any text that isn’t valid as a float representation.

Before 2.6, float("NaN") would raise a ValueError on Windows. Now it returns a float for which math.isnan() returns True, which is not useful behaviour for my application. (As was pointed out, this has always been a platform-dependent behaviour, but consider it an undesirable behaviour for my purposes, wherever it happens.)

Here’s what I’ve got at the moment:

import math
def get_floats(source):
    for text in source.split():
        try:
            val = float(text)
            if math.isnan(val) or math.isinf(val):
                raise ValueError
            yield val
        except ValueError:
            pass

This is a generator, which I can supply with strings containing whitespace-separated sequences representing real numbers. I’d like it to yield only those fields which are purely numeric representations of floats, as in “1.23” or “-34e6”, but not for example “NaN” or “-Inf”. Things that aren’t floats at all, e.g. “hello”, should be ignored as well.

Test case:

assert list(get_floats('1.23 foo -34e6 NaN -Inf')) == [1.23, -34000000.0]

Please suggest alternatives you consider more elegant, even if they involve “look before you leap” (which is normally considered a lesser approach in Python).

Edited to clarify that non-float text such as “hello” should just be ignored quietly as well. The purpose is to pull out only those things that are real numbers and ignore everything else.

Answer 1

I’d write it like this. I think it combines conciseness with readability.

def is_finite(x):
    return not math.isnan(x) and not math.isinf(x)

def get_floats(source):
    for x in source.split():
        try:
            yield float(x)
        except ValueError:
            pass

def get_finite_floats(source):
    return (x for x in get_floats(source) if is_finite(x))