python - Invalid Operation with Decimal

Question

I'm using beautiful soup to extract information from a website and to get the price of an item. I used the code below to create a variable names prices to store the information. Then I created a loop to iterate through all of the items and now I'm trying to compare it to another variable named price_thres to determine if its less than or equal to the amount. Running this code prints a few of the correct values but it also prints

    price_in_dec = Decimal(i.text)
decimal.InvalidOperation: [<class 'decimal.ConversionSyntax'>]

prices = soup.find_all("span", itemprop="price")

for i in prices:
    price_in_dec = Decimal(i.text)
    if price_in_dec <= price_thres:
        print(price_in_dec)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65878027/invalid-operation-with-decimal

Answer 1

You seem to have commas (,) in some of your prices.

Try this:

import locale

# Set to US locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'USA')

prices = soup.find_all("span", itemprop="price")

for i in prices:
    price_in_dec = Decimal(locale.atof(i.text))
    if price_in_dec <= price_thres:
        print(price_in_dec)

By using the correct locale, you can parse the prices according to the way you write them in the US.

Another option would be to simply remove commas using i.text.replace(",", "").