Value Error:could not convert string to float: b'**' about dbfread HOT 8 CLOSED

Had the same problem, but with an tailing . (dot). Modified parseN to also do a rstrip(b'.'). Works like a charm! Thanks

from dbfread.

It looks like there are two '*' characters at the end of each value. I first thought it might be padding, but '0.00**' and '**' are not the same length.

Could you try to open the file with raw=True and see what you get?

Here's a workaround that might work:

from dbfread import DBF, FieldParser

class AsteriskFieldParser(FieldParser):
    def parseN(self, field, value):
        value = value.strip().strip('*')
        return FieldParser.parseN(self, field, value)

f = DBF('test.dbf', load=True, encoding='latin1',
        parserclass=AsteriskFieldParser)

from dbfread.

Thanks for the help. My work around was editing the parseN function in field_parser. I added another replace() to account for the asterisks and replaced them with a 0, resulting in '0.000'. I also tried to replace the majority of the "0.00**" values in the actual dbf files. I realize this could cause problems if a value of "5**", for example, showed up but it appears to have been OK in my use case.

def parseN(self, field, data):
    """Parse numeric field (N)

    Returns int, float or None if the field is empty.
    """
    try:
        return int(data)
    except ValueError:
        if not data.strip():
            return None
        else:
            # Account for , in numeric fields
            return float(data.replace(b',', b'.').replace(b'**', b'0'))

from dbfread.

Why not simply remove the '*' characters? 0.000 is the same as 0.00 after all.

from dbfread.

I'm having this error:
in parseN
return float(data.replace(b',', b'.'))
ValueError: could not convert string to float: b'***********'

from dbfread.

I've added some code to remove the '*' characters in float fields. Could you try my develop branch and see if it works for you?

from dbfread.

In develop branch but adding the same line to parseN too works fine.
In my case the column with problems is a numeric field.

from dbfread.

Ah, sounds good. I've pushed a fix to my develop branch. Thanks for reporting this.

from dbfread.