The problem is that you try to parse "x.x\n", e.g: 1.8\n. And this returns an error: strconv.ParseFloat: parsing "1.8\n": invalid syntax. You can do a strings.TrimSpace function or to convert feet[:len(feet)-1] to delete \n character

With strings.TrimSpace() (you need to import strings package):

feetFloat, _ := strconv.ParseFloat(strings.TrimSpace(feet), 64)

Wtih feet[:len(feet)-1]:

feetFloat, _ := strconv.ParseFloat(feet[:len(feet)-1], 64)

Output in both cases:

10.8 feet converted to meters give you 3.2918400000000005 meters

float has the type float32, but strconv.ParseFloat returns float64. All you need to do is convert the result:

// "var float float32" up here somewhere
value, err := strconv.ParseFloat(myString, 32)
if err != nil {
    // do something sensible
}
float = float32(value)

Depending on the situation, it may be better to change float's type to float64.

Go uses IEEE-754 binary floating-point numbers. Floating-point numbers are imprecise. Don't use them for financial transactions. Use integers.

For example,

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "strconv"
    "strings"
)

func parseCents(s string) (int64, error) {
    n := strings.SplitN(s, ".", 3)
    if len(n) != 2 || len(n[1]) != 2 {
        err := fmt.Errorf("format error: %s", s)
        return 0, err
    }
    d, err := strconv.ParseInt(n[0], 10, 56)
    if err != nil {
        return 0, err
    }
    c, err := strconv.ParseUint(n[1], 10, 8)
    if err != nil {
        return 0, err
    }
    if d < 0 {
        c = -c
    }
    return d*100 + int64(c), nil
}

func main() {
    s := "79.35"
    fmt.Println(parseCents(s))
    s = "149.20"
    fmt.Println(parseCents(s))
    s = "-149.20"
    fmt.Println(parseCents(s))
    s = "149.2"
    fmt.Println(parseCents(s))
}

Playground: https://play.golang.org/p/mGuO51QWyIv

Output:

7935 <nil>
14920 <nil>
-14920 <nil>
0 format error: 149.2

Your best bet is the use the standard library's strconv. You can make your own wrappers and locale stuff. Eventually I'd add more error checking and turn this into it's own package, but here is an idea. If you haven't found a package yet there is a good chance you will have to write your own. For a more general solution, you'd have to think about every possible input.. normalize that per locale and enforce those rules when others are using your tools... That would be a more complex solution given the number of if statements and pieces of logic.. The good part is that you know the type of input strconv.ParseFloat expects.. So all you really have to do is take the user input and transform it to the programmatic standard http://floating-point-gui.de/formats/fp/. Given numbers are mostly universal, with the exception of commas and decimal points, there shouldn't be many use cases. You might even be able to generalize further and say there are two main formats.. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-countries-use-a-period-and-others-use-a-comma-to-separate-large-numbers, which is largely broken down to Europe et al and British/American, where German uses the standard almost all of Europe does. Under that assumption there isn't really much to do as the use cases comes down to 2.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "strconv"
    "strings"
)

func normalizeGerman(old string) string {
    s := strings.Replace(old, ",", ".", -1)
    return strings.Replace(s, ".", "", 1)
}
func normalizeAmerican(old string) string {
    return strings.Replace(old, ",", "", -1)
}

var locale map[string]func(string) string

func init() {
    locale = make(map[string]func(string) string)
    locale["DE-DE"] = normalizeGerman
    locale["US"] = normalizeAmerican
}

func main() {
    var f, f2 float64
    var err error
    // german
    if val, ok := locale["DE-DE"]; ok {
        f, err = strconv.ParseFloat(val("1.234,87"), 64)
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal("german fail", err)
        }
    }
    //american
    if val, ok := locale["US"]; ok {
        f2, err = strconv.ParseFloat(val("1,234.87"), 64)
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal("american fail", err)
        }
    }

    fmt.Println(f, f2)

}