title: Removing quotation marks and convert to floats
body: <p>I have a text file that is formatted like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>DEPT    FTR RPT_PERIOD
  Project Management  "68,760.23" 12-Month
  Project Management  "142,483.33"    12-Month
  AEC Administration  "37,175.06" 12-Month
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My goal is to extract the salaries in the quotation marks (under the FTR column), add them all up and find the average according to the department. When I append the salaries to a list, however, they are all in strings and I can't remove the quotation marks to convert them into floats. This is what I have so far, and I'm working on the code step by step:</p>
  
  <pre><code>salary_file = open("salaries.txt", "r")
  headers = salary_file.readline()
  
  salaries = [] 
  
  for line in salary_file.readlines():
    line.rstrip()
    (dept, ftr, rpt_period) = line.split('\t')
    salaries.append(ftr)
  
  print salaries
  #Sample output: ['"68,760.23"', '"142,483.33"', '"37,175.06"']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What can I do to remove the " " quotation marks so that I can convert them to floats using map?</p>