5.2. Type Conversion

Sometimes it is necessary to convert values from one type to another. A common example is when a program receives input from a user or a file. In this situation, numeric data may be passed to the program as strings.

Type conversion is the process of converting a variable of one type to another type. In Python, we can do this using either implicit type conversion or explicit type conversion.

Implicit type conversion is when Python converts a variable to a different type without any extra effort from us as programmers. For example, if you add a variable of type int and a variable of type float together, the resulting sum is a float. With implicit type conversion, Python will always convert to a larger data type so no data is lost.

Note

If you try to add an integer and a string together, you may notice that Python cannot convert the result to a data type. While implicity type conversion is a handy trick, it doesn’t work in every scenario!

Explicit type conversion uses functions such as int(), str(), and float() to convert variables of one type to another.

The int() function can take a string and turn it into an integer. Let us see this in action:

Example

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print(int("2345"))
print(type(int("2345")))
print(int(17))

Console Output

2345
int
17

What happens if we attempt to convert a string to an integer, and the string doesn’t directly represent an integer?

Example

print(int("23bottles"))

Console Output

ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '23bottles'

This example shows that a string has to be a syntactically legal number for conversion to go as expected. Examples of such strings are "34" or "-2.5". If the value cannot be cleanly converted to a number then ValueError will be returned, which means that the value of our string is not compatible as a number

The type conversion function str() turns its argument into a string. Remember that when we print a string, the quotes may be removed. However, if we print the type, we can see that it is definitely 'string'.

Example

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print(str(17))
print(str(123.45))
print(type(str(123.45)))

Console Output

17
123.45
string

5.2.1. Check Your Understanding

Question

Which of the following strings result in ValueError when passed to int()? (Feel free to try running each of the conversions.)

  1. '3'

  2. 'three'

  3. '3 3'

  4. '33'