# Logstash converting empty string into 0.0
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797
**Category:** Logstash
**Created:** [July 3, 2019, 7:08pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797 "2019-07-03T19:08:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@rahulkothanath](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rahulkothanath)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2019, 7:08pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797/1 "2019-07-03T19:08:49Z")
Hi,
I am converting an amount value into float as follows.
```
mutate{
convert => {
"AMT" => "float"
}
```
if "AMT"="" empty spcae ,it give 0.0 as the conversion output. this may mislead people since it is an amount field.
is there a way to avoid this problem..?
thanks for reading and helping.
---
### Author:  [@Badger](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Badger)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2019, 7:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797/2 "2019-07-03T19:27:35Z")
Yes, a mutate will do that. You could make the mutate conditional upon AMT not being blank.
```
if [AMT] != "" {
[...]
```
---
### Author:  [@rahulkothanath](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rahulkothanath)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2019, 8:05pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797/3 "2019-07-03T20:05:05Z")
that works. Actually I have to convert more than 10 fields like this and checking each one of this doesnt look good to me. is there a way to do this using ruby filter with for loop on a list of fields to convert?
thanks for reading and helping.
---
### Author:  [@Badger](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Badger)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2019, 9:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797/4 "2019-07-03T21:15:54Z")
Yes, you could do something like this:
```
ruby {
code => '
["amount", "foo", "bar", "baz"].each { |x|
s = event.get(x)
if s and (s.to_f.to_s == s) then
event.set(x, s.to_f)
end
}
'
}
```
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2019, 9:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-converting-empty-string-into-0-0/188797/5 "2019-07-31T21:17:58Z")
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