str = [  3.82133931e-01   4.27354313e-02   1.94678816e-03   0.00000000e+000.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+000.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+00   0.00000000e+000.00000000e+00   3.61185198e-06   1.26606241e-01   1.18472360e-01]

The above string has been retrieved from a database text field and I'm trying to convert it back into a list of floats however no matter what I try I can't seem to get rid of the square brackets.

floatList = []for k, v in enumerate(str.split('   ')):if re.search(r'\d', v):item = re.sub(r'\D\S', '', v).rstrip()item = re.sub(r'\[.*?\]/g', '', item)floatList.append(float(item))

I have tried:

item.replace('[', '')
item.replace(']', '')

and with the Ascii codes.

Always the error ValueError: could not convert string to float: '[ 536444501'

It seems like you should be able to just strip off the [ and ]:

str = str.replace('[', '').replace(']', '')

And then split the string calling float on each member of the split string:

floats = [float(x) for x in str.split()]

Notice that because python strings are immutable, things like:

str.replace('[', '')

Doesn't change str in place. Instead, it returns a new string with the requested characters removed. Since it returns a new string, we need to give that string a name (I just chose to give it the name str¹ again to avoid using too many names...)

^{1Note that str is also not a good name for a variable since it shadows the builtin str type. I would highly recommend picking a different name :-)}