Removing commas is potentially dangerous because, as others have mentioned in the comments, many locales use a comma to mean something different (like a decimal place).

I don't know where you got your string from, but in some places in the world "2,299.00" = 2.299

The Intl object could have been a nice way to tackle this problem, but somehow they managed to ship the spec with only a Intl.NumberFormat.format() API and no parse counterpart :(

The only way to parse a string with cultural numeric characters in it to a machine recognisable number in any i18n sane way is to use a library that leverages CLDR data to cover off all possible ways of formatting number strings http://cldr.unicode.org/

The two best JS options I've come across for this so far:

• https://github.com/google/closure-library/tree/master/closure/goog/i18n
• https://github.com/globalizejs/globalize

I don't know why no one has suggested this expression-

parseFloat( theString.replace(/[^\d\.]/g,'') );

Removes any non-numeric characters except for periods. You don't need custom functions/loops for this either, that's just overkill.

javascript's parseFloat doesn't take a locale parameter. So you will have to replace , with .

parseFloat('0,04'.replace(/,/, '.')); // 0.04

I realise I'm late to the party, but I wanted a solution for this that properly handled digit grouping as well as different decimal separators for currencies. As none of these fully covered my use case I wrote my own solution which may be useful to others:

function parsePotentiallyGroupedFloat(stringValue) {
    stringValue = stringValue.trim();
    var result = stringValue.replace(/[^0-9]/g, '');
    if (/[,\.]\d{2}$/.test(stringValue)) {
        result = result.replace(/(\d{2})$/, '.$1');
    }
    return parseFloat(result);
}

This should strip out any non-digits and then check whether there was a decimal point (or comma) followed by two digits and insert the decimal point if needed.

It's worth noting that I aimed this specifically for currency and as such it assumes either no decimal places or exactly two. It's pretty hard to be sure about whether the first potential decimal point encountered is a decimal point or a digit grouping character (e.g., 1.542 could be 1542) unless you know the specifics of the current locale, but it should be easy enough to tailor this to your specific use case by changing \d{2}$ to something that will appropriately match what you expect to be after the decimal point.

Here it is annotated

originalNum = '1,022.55';
cleanNum = originalNum.replace(",", "");
float = parseFloat(cleanNum);
console.log(float);

Alternatively you can just make it a one-liner by using

float = parseFloat('1,022.55'.replace(",", ""));
console.log(float);