Convert a number enclosed in parentheses (string) to a negative integer (or float) using Python?

Question

In Python, what is the simplest way to convert a number enclosed in parentheses (string) to a negative integer (or float)?

For example, \'(4,301)\' to -4301, as commonly

Answer 1

Assuming just removing the , is safe enough, and you may wish to apply the same function to values that may contain negative numbers or not, then:

import re
print float(re.sub(r'^\((.*?)\)$', r'-\1', a).replace(',',''))

You could then couple that with using locale as other answers have shown, eg:

import locale, re

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF-8')
print locale.atof(re.sub('^\((.*?)\)$', r'-\1', a))