ValueError: could not convert string to float about dbfread HOT 2 OPEN

My solution was to simply strip out all null \x00 characters before processing numbers and dates. I've added this code in my own customer parser that overrides parseN and parseD:

from dbfread import FieldParser

class MyFieldParser(FieldParser):
    def parseN(self, field, data):
        data = data.strip().strip(b'*\x00')  # Had to strip out the other characters first before \x00, as per super function specs.
        return super(MyFieldParser, self).parseN(field, data)

    def parseD(self, field, data):
        data = data.strip(b'\x00')
        return super(MyFieldParser, self).parseD(field, data)

# Usage
db = DBF("mydbf.dbf", parserclass=MyFieldParser)

I'm converting some old-school point-of-sale databases over to a newer database. I'm not sure if the data is simply corrupt in the DBF (although Excel doesn't seem to mind opening them without warning). The newer sets of DBFs in my collection doesn't seem to have this issue so I'm thinking it could just be improper file handling from older software.

Hope this helps someone.

Edit: Added import line to code

from dbfread.

Thanks for reporting this. This is the first time I see a binary N field.

I would add your changes but I'm worried that it would cause other files to fail. For example, the value b' 3.14' could be parsed either as text (3.14) or as binary (858665268), but without any context there's no way to tell which one to choose. (parseN() will always get data as a byte string so you can't tell by its type.)

Do you know what software was used to create the file?

from dbfread.