> Subject: [Tutor] Does casting exist in Python? > Does it? That depends on what you mean by casting. A cast in C literally telly the compiler to treat one piece of data as if it were another type of data.
For example char c = 'a'; float f = (float)c; Tells C to take the character stored in c and treat it as a floating point number. It does not change the type of c it merely treats the data as if it were another type. However in practice many people use casting as a type conversion operation and think of it in that light - which often leads to strange and subtle bugs! Python does do type conversion by applying conversion functions such as str(), int(), float() list() etc [Actually I believe these are now callable types which is subtly different but I'll ignore that for now!] If you do want to do a cast (ie. re-interpret data) the only way that I know of is to use the struct module. That allows you to take a piece of data and write it as a byte string, you can then reinterpret the byte string using a different format set and effectively the same byte sequence that started as a char will be read as a float! (there might be issues if the buyte string lengths don;t match....) HTH, Alan G Author of the learn to program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
