2.3 Mixed data types

Learning objectives

By the end of this section you should be able to

• Identify the data types produced by operations with integers, floats, and strings.
• Use operators and type conversions to combine integers, floats, and strings.

Combining integers and floats

Programmers often need to combine numbers of different data types. Ex: A program computes the total for an online shopping order:

quantity = int(input())
price = float(input())
total = quantity * price
print(total)

quantity is an integer, and price is a float. So what is the data type of total? For input 3 and 5.0, total is a float, and the program prints 15.0.

Combining an integer and a float produces a float. A float is by default printed with at least one figure after the decimal point and has as many figures as needed to represent the value. Note: Division using the / operator always produces a float.

Combining numeric types and strings

Easy type conversion in Python can lead a programmer to assume that any data type can be combined with another. Ex: Noor's program reads in a number from input and uses the number in a calculation. This results in an error in the program because the input function by default stores the number as a string. Strings and numeric data types are incompatible for addition, subtraction, and division. One of the operands needs to be explicitly converted depending on the goal of arithmetic or string concatenation.

The * operator also serves as the repetition operator, which accepts a string operand and an integer operand and repeats the string. Ex: "banjo" * 3 produces "banjobanjobanjo".