I am reading an ASCII data file and converting some of the strings to integers or floats. However, some of the data is corrupted and the conversion doesn't work. I know that I can us exceptions, but they don't seem like the cleanest and simplest solution to me.
You should reconsider this thought. It's quite clean and fast:
for s in get_ASCII_strings_from_data_file():
try:
f = float(s)
except ValueError:
do_whatever_you_need_to_do_for_invalid_data()I would like to simply perform a pre-check before I do the conversion, but I can't figure out how to do it.
Again, this is the less Pythonic approach, but one option would be to use regular expressions:
matcher = re.compile(r'[\d.]+')
for s in get_ASCII_strings_from_data_file():
if matcher.match(s):
f = float(s)
else:
do_whatever_you_need_to_do_for_invalid_data()but note that this won't except valid floats like '1e10'. You'll also note that this is actually less concise than the exception based approach.
Steve
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