It seems like you have a bunch of null characters in the string for some reason. You could try stripping them out with replace:
julia> x = "\x002\0.\x005\0" "\x002\0.\x005\0" julia> y = replace(x,"\0","") "2.5" julia> parse(Float64, y) 2.5 On Tuesday, 25 October 2016 05:44:34 UTC+1, Chris Stook wrote: > > I'm trying to parse a text file which contains some floating point > numbers. The number 2.5 is represented by the string "\x002\0.\x005\0". > Parse will not convert this to a Float64. Print works (prints "2.5") in > Atom and Jupyter, but not in the REPL. > > _ > _ _ _(_)_ | A fresh approach to technical computing > (_) | (_) (_) | Documentation: http://docs.julialang.org > _ _ _| |_ __ _ | Type "?help" for help. > | | | | | | |/ _` | | > | | |_| | | | (_| | | Version 0.5.0 (2016-09-19 18:14 UTC) > _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_| | Official http://julialang.org/ release > |__/ | x86_64-w64-mingw32 > > julia> print("\x002\0.\x005\0") > �2�.�5� > julia> parse(Float64,"\x002\0.\x005\0") > ERROR: ArgumentError: invalid number format "\x002\0.\x005\0" for Float64 > in parse(::Type{Float64}, ::String) at .\parse.jl:167 > > julia> > > I am not familiar with Unicode. Is the Unicode valid? How should I > convert this to a Float? I do not have control over the input file. > > Thanks, > Chris > >
