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How to Safely Coerce Strings to Numbers in Python

A safe conversion function that turns strings into integers or floats, returning a fallback value when conversion fails.

type-conversion robust-parsing data-cleaning

Python

import math

def to_number(value, fallback=None):
    """Safely coerce a string to int or float, returning fallback on failure."""
    if isinstance(value, (int, float)):
        return value
    try:
        # Try int first for clean whole numbers
        return int(value)
    except (ValueError, TypeError):
        …

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