Type Coercion¶
There are occasions when we would like to convert a variable from one data type to another. This is referred to as type coercion. We can coerce a variable to another date type by passing it to a function whose name is identical to the desired data type. For instance, if we want to convert a variable x to an integer, we would use the command int(x). If we want to convert a variable y to a float, we would wuse float(y).
We will study coercion more later, but for now, let’s see what happens when we coerce ints to floats and vice-versa.
# Coercing an int to a float.
x_int = 19
x_float = float(x_int)
print(x_float)
print(type(x_float))
19.0
<class 'float'>
# Coercing a float to an int.
y_float = 6.8
y_int = int(y_float)
print(y_int)
print(type(y_int))
6
<class 'int'>
Notice that we we coerce a float to an int, the Python does not round the float to the nearest integer. Instead, it truncates (or chops off) the decimal portion of the number. In other words, when performing float-to-int coercion, Python will ALWAYS round the number DOWN to the next lowest integer, regardless of the value of the decimal portion.