CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythontypes
prismo
prismo

Reputation: 1899

How to extract type from string

I need some way to reliably identify whether a string can be of another type eg. "1" would evaluate to 1 - an int, "2.0" would evaluate to 2.0 - a float and "John has 3 apples" would just evaluate to a string. Is there some package that does this - builtin or otherwise?

It would be great if it also worked on dates and currency

Upvotes: 1

Views: 636

Answers (2)

DNy
DNy

Reputation: 799

You can do this with ast.literal_eval

int_type = ast.literal_eval("1")
float_type = ast.literal_eval("2.0")

But will only work on python literal structures: strings, bytes, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, sets, booleans, None and Ellipsis

Upvotes: 3

Ratery
Ratery

Reputation: 2917

You can use try/except block for primitive types:

strings = ["1", "2.0", "John has 3 apples"]

def get_value(s):
    types = (int, float, str)
    for type in types:
        try:
            return type(s)
        except ValueError:
            pass

print(get_value(strings[0]))
print(get_value(strings[1]))
print(get_value(strings[2]))

Upvotes: 3

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