translating foreign data

[Peter Otten]

Ethan Furman wrote:

> I need to translate numeric data in a string format into a binary format. 
> I know there are at least two different
> methods of representing parts less that 1, such as "10.5" and "10,5".  The
> data is encoded using code pages, and can vary depending on the file being
> read (so I can't rely on current locale settings).
> 
> I'm sure this is a solved problem, but I'm not finding those solutions. 
> Any pointers?

There's babel

http://babel.pocoo.org/en/latest/numbers.html#parsing-numbers

though I'm not sure what to think of the note below the linked paragraph.