Python equivalent to atoi / atof

Question

Python loves raising exceptions, which is usually great. But I\'m facing some strings I desperately want to convert to integers using C\'s atoi / atof semantics - e.g. atoi

Answer 1

Perhaps use a quick regex to grab only the first part of the string that can be considered numeric? Something like...

-?[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?

for floats and for ints just,

-?[0-9]+