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I am trying to read in a 4 column txt file and create a 5th column. Column 1 is a string and columns 2-4 are numbers, however they are being read as strings. I have two questions - my python script is currently unable to perform multiplication on two of the columns because it is reading columns 2-4 as strings. I want to know how to change columns 2-4 (which are numbers) to floating numbers and then create a 5th column that is two of the previous columns multiplied together.

S. Mac
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  • Please post your code and clearly explain what parts you find are not working. The more you can provide and explain, the better we can help. This is a good reference: http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask – idjaw Oct 06 '15 at 23:23
  • Possible duplicate of [Parse String to Float or Int](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/379906/parse-string-to-float-or-int) – TigerhawkT3 Oct 06 '15 at 23:24

3 Answers3

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You can cast strings to floats in python like so.

>>> float('1.25')
1.25
Gil
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Just cast them to float using float(x) method where x is the string that contains the float

Gudbergur
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Whenever you iterate over the Lines, you could run the string through a try-except operation like:

try:
    float(value)
except ValueError:
    pass
    #Or do some kind of error handling here
Xeno
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