Read FORTRAN formatted numbers with Python

Question

I have to read a data file that contains numbers formatted with (very) old FORTRAN style. A line of the file looks like this:

 4.500000+1 1.894719-3 4.600000         


        

Answer 1

You could use a regular expression to insert the "E"s before passing the numbers to float.

re.sub(r'(\d)([-+])', r'\1E\2', number)