How to convert a string to a number if it has commas in it as thousands separators?

Question

I have a string that represents a number which uses commas to separate thousands. How can I convert this to a number in python?

>>> int(\"1,000,000         


        

Answer 1

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
'en_US.UTF-8'
>>> print locale.atoi('1,000,000')
1000000
>>> print locale.atof('1,000,000.53')
1000000.53

this is done on Linux in US.