> i have an html/cgi input that takes in values to a mysql
> database, however, if i stick in $20 instead of 20, it
> crashes the program because of the extra $ sign. I was
> wondering if anyone has a quick regular expression in
> python to remove the $-sign if it is present in the
> input.
While the others have provided non-regexp solutions, I
suspect there's a deeper underlying problem here if a simple
dollar-sign is causing the program to die.
If you find where this death happens, there's usually an
associated escape() function that will handle all the
troublesome characters. My suspicion is that you're trying
to stick this string value into a numeric field in your
database. Thus, you want to strip out *anything* that will
cause a mysql assignment-to-a-numeric-field to barf.
If you really must do it with a regexp:
Just strip a dollar-sign:
result = re.sub(r'\$','',input_value)
If you want to strip any non-numerics:
result = re.sub(r'[^0-9]', '', input_value)
If you want decimal points too:
result = re.sub(r'[^0-9.]', '', input_value)
As someone else mentioned, you might want to take other
currency conventions (namely, using commas rather than
periods) into consideration. Thus, I'd do it in a two-step
result = re.sub(r'[^0-9.]', '',
input_value.replace(",", "."))
This normalizes all commas to periods and then strips out
anything that isn't a digit or a period. This will still
give your program grief if someone puts in something like
"$192.168.3.14".
Thus, you might want to just pull out the dollars and
optional cents, and use them:
r = re.compile(r'.*?(\d+)([.,]\d\d)?.*')
m = r.match(input_value)
if m:
dollars = m.group(1)
cents = m.group(2)
if not cents:
cents = cents[1:]
else:
cents = "00"
else:
raise BogusValueFromDoofusError
new_input_value = "%s.%s" % (dollars, cents)
With the above bogus IP-address/currency value, this would
produce a valid result of "192.16" which may or may not be
what you want. Caveat regextor.
Feel free to monkey with the regexp to adjust for your wants.
-tim
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
