Thread shed: step 14

Data Science
1

Hello! I am doing the thread shed exercise and the task 14 says: " Now, consider the list sales . It is a list of strings that we want to sum. In order for us to sum these values, we will have to remove the $ , and set them equal to floats.
Iterate through sales and for each item, strip off the $ , set it equal to a float, and add it to total_sales"

I have tried this code and it does not work:
total_sales = 0
for amount in sales:
amount.strip(“$”)
total_sales += float(amount)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “script.py”, line 142, in
total_sales += float(amount)
ValueError: could not convert string to float: ‘$1.21’

However, the solution they give us, it is really similar and it works:
total_sales = 0
for amount in sales:
total_sales += float(amount.strip(“$”))

Can someone explain to me why mine does not work??

Thank you!!! :blush:

2

Hello angelsalbiol205,

You are getting a ValueError because you you can’t convert string to an float.
What’s happening is, “amount” is still a string when you are trying to add it to total_sales.

Your code: with comments:

sales = ['$12.00', '$4.00']  # arbitrary data. 

total_sales = 0
for amount in sales:
    amount.strip("$")  # This does nothing because of the immutable characteristics of string data types.
    # I added a print statement to show you the results:
    print(amount)   # $4.00 
    print(type(amount))  # <class 'str'>
    '''
    As you see,  'amount' is still a string with the dollar sign ($) attached.
    You can't cast a non-digit string like this as a float.
    This is why you are getting a ValueError "could not convert string to float."
    '''
    total_sales += float(amount)

The sample solution you provided works because the dollar sign was stripped before it is casted to a float.
In another example:

x = '$1'

print(float(x))  # ValueError
print(float(x.strip("$")))  # 1.0

The first solution doesn’t work because ‘x’ is still a string with the dollar sign attached.
The second solution works because the dollar sign is stripped from ‘x’ first before it is casted to a float.

If you want your code to work try this:

total_sales = 0
for amount in sales:
    # Because strings are immutable assign a new string value to equal the desired result.
    amount = amount.strip("$")    
    total_sales += float(amount)

print(total_sales)

I hope this helps!

3 Likes
3

This helps a lot! As a beginner, it’s difficult to understand why your code does not work sometimes

Thank you! :grinning:

1 Like
5

I tried the code but neither of them worked.

for amount in sales:
amount = amount.strip(“$”)
total_sales += float(amount)

print(total_sales)

6

Please format your code by reading this post → How do I format code in my posts? - Frequently Asked Questions / Codecademy FAQ - Codecademy Forums and read this on how to get answers for your questions → How to ask good questions (and get good answers) - Get Started - Codecademy Forums

Based on your code now, you did not initialize total_sales and assign a value to it. Other than that, there might be identation error in your code.