Question

Okay i need to turn a string to a float do some math then back to a string

def item_price(data):       #grabs price of item
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
    info = soup.find('span', itemprop='price').text
    info = info.replace("$","")
    info = float(info);         #  but evary thing below this line goes wrong 
    info = info * .2 + info
    info = "$" + string(info);
    return(info);

Answer 1

While I don’t know anything about BeautifulSoap, but I think it’s the semicolons. Try this and see if it works:

from decimal import *

def item_price(data):       
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
    info = soup.find('span', itemprop='price').text
    info = info.replace("$","")
    info = Decimal(info)
    info = (info * Decimal(0.2)) + info
    return '${0:.2f}'.format(info)

Note: you had some other obvious syntax problems that I tried to clean up. Also, note that you should probably use decimal (over float) for money.

Link to Decimal docs