Python Essentials

Using the built-in conversion functions

We have a number of conversion functions in the various types of data we've seen in this chapter. Each of the built-in numeric types has a proper constructor function. As with many Python functions, each of these has a number of different kinds of arguments it can handle:

• int(): Creates an int from a wide variety of other objects
  • int(3.718) for another number
  • int('48879') for a string in base 10
  • int('beef', 16) for a string in the given base—16 in this example
  • The int() function can ignore the extra prefix characters on numbers written in Python literal syntax: int('0b1010',2), int('0xbeef',16), and int('0o123',8)
• float(): Creates a float from other objects
  • float(7331) for another number
  • float('4.8879e5') for a ...