I'm trying to Use python's Beautiful Soup Library to grab a bunch of divs from an html file, and from there get the string - which is a money value - that's inside the div. Then remove the dollar sign and convert it to a decimal so that I can use a greater than and less than conditional statement to compare values. I have googled the heck out of it and can't seem to come up with a way to convert this unicode string into a decimal value. I really could use some help here. How do I convert unicode into a decimal value? This was my last attempt: import unicodedata from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(open("/Users/sm/Documents/python/htmldemo.html")) for tag in soup.findAll("div",attrs={"itemprop":"price"}) : val = tag.string new_val = val[8:] workable = int(new_val) if workable > 250: print(type(workable)) else: print(type(workable)) Edit: When I print the type of new_val I get : print(type(new_val))