# Parsing Float64 as Float64
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301
**Category:** General Usage
**Created:** [June 24, 2022, 10:51am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301 "2022-06-24T10:51:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ccookeopen](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ccookeopen)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2022, 10:51am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301/1 "2022-06-24T10:51:13Z")
Hi,
Reading data from various excel files, sometimes it is correctly formatted as a Float, sometimes it is interpreted as a string.
If I account for the second case, I must use parse(Float64, input). Using this code in the first case gives the error
no method matching parse(::Type{Float64}, ::Float64)
It seems odd that the parser cannot interpret a Float64 number as… a Float64 number.
The workaround is to tediously reproduce code for both instances, whereas accepting Float64 as an argument means the same code would work either way.
C
---
### Author:  [@jedforrest](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jedforrest)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2022, 11:23am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301/2 "2022-06-24T11:23:48Z")
It looks like `parse` is only for converting strings into numbers, and doesn’t work on any other type (for that, you could use `convert` instead).
This is a little hacky, but you could try turning everything into a string first?
```julia
parse(Float64, string(x))
```
---
### Author:  [@nilshg](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nilshg)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2022, 11:23am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301/3 "2022-06-24T11:23:59Z")
That’s probably this issue:
[https://github.com/felipenoris/XLSX.jl/issues/192](https://github.com/felipenoris/XLSX.jl/issues/192)
You can do `x -> x isa Number ? x : parse(Float64, x)`
---
### Author:  [@jules](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jules)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2022, 11:59am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parsing-float64-as-float64/83301/4 "2022-06-24T11:59:13Z")
I think it’s good that parsing is restricted to strings, but you can make your own parsing function that is more lenient. This one always accepts a value of type T as is if we’re parsing that T. One could think of even more lenient variants:
```julia
sloppy_parse(::Type{T}, x::T) where T = x
sloppy_parse(T, x) = parse(T, x)
```