Learning Python for Forensics

Data type conversions

In some situations, the initial data type might not be the desired data type and needs to be changed while preserving its content. For example, when a user inputs arguments from the command line, the commands are commonly captured as strings and sometimes that user input needs to be, for example, an integer. We need to use the integer class constructor to convert that string object before processing the data. Imagine we have a simple script that returns the square of a user-supplied integer; we need to first convert the user-input to an integer prior to squaring the input. One of the most common ways to convert data types is to wrap the variable or string with the constructor method seen in the following example for each ...