CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringlist
john
john

Reputation: 192

Change specific elements of a list from string to integers in python

If I have a list such as

c=['my', 'age', 'is', '5\n','The', 'temperature', 'today' 'is' ,'87\n']

How do I specifically Convert the numbers of the the list into integers leaving the rest of the string as it is and get rid of the \n ?

expected output: 

`c=['my', 'age', 'is', 5,'The', 'temperature', 'today' 'is' ,87]`

I tried using the 'map()' and 'isdigit()' function but it didnt work.

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 363

Answers (2)

cdlane
cdlane

Reputation: 41872

If you don't know the format of integers in your text, or there are just too many variations, then one approach is simply to try int() on everything and see what succeeds or fails:

original = ['my', 'age', 'is', '5\n', 'The', 'temperature', 'today', 'is', '87\n']
revised = []

for token in original:
    try:
        revised.append(int(token))
    except ValueError:
        revised.append(token)

print(revised)

Generally using try and except as part of your algorithm, not just your error handling, is a bad practice, since they aren't efficient. However, in this case, it's too hard to predict all the possible inputs that int(), or float(), can successfully handle, so the try approach is reasonable.

Upvotes: 1

AChampion
AChampion

Reputation: 30258

You can write a function that tries to convert to an int and if it fails return the original, e.g:

def conv(x):
    try:
        x = int(x)
    except ValueError:
        pass
    return x

>>> c = ['my', 'age', 'is', '5\n','The', 'temperature', 'today' 'is' ,'87\n']
>>> list(map(conv, c))
['my', 'age', 'is', 5, 'The', 'temperature', 'todayis', 87]
>>> [conv(x) for x in c]
['my', 'age', 'is', 5, 'The', 'temperature', 'todayis', 87]

Note: 2 strings separated by whitespace are automatically concatenated by python, e.g. 'today' 'is' is equivalent to 'todayis'

Upvotes: 1

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