Python Tutorial - Numbers and Conversion

1. Python Number Data Type
2. Python Number Type Conversion
3. Python Fractional Numbers

In this section, you will learn number data type in Python programming and the mathematical operations that you can perform on these numbers. Further, you will learn how to convert from one data type to another.

Python Number Data Type

The number data type in Python include:

1. Integers
2. Floating point numbers
3. Complex numbers

Integer numbers do not have any fractional/decimal part.

Floating point numbers contain a decimal part.

Complex numbers have a real part and an imaginary part. Complex numbers are in the form x + yj, where x is the real part and yj is the imaginary part.

The function type() is used to get the data type of a variable or more generally, an object. The function isinstance() is used to check if the variable belongs to a particular class or not.

x = 3
print("type of", x, "is", type(x))
x = 3.23
print("type of", x, "is", type(x))
x = 3 + 3j
print("is", x, "a complex number:", isinstance(x, complex))

Result:

type of 3 is <class 'int'>
type of 3.23 is <class 'float'>
is (3+3j) a complex number: True

Integer numbers can be of any length but the floating point numbers should only be up to 15 decimal places.

The integers could also be represented binary (base 2), hexadecimal (base 16) and octal (base 8) format. This can be done by using prefixes. Check the table below:

Example:

>>> print(0b110)
6
>>> print(0xFA)
250
>>> print(0o12)
10

Python Number Type Conversion

Implicit Type Conversion

If you add one number of float type and one another number of int type, the result’s type will be float. Here int is converted to float implicitly.

>>> 2 + 3.0
5.0

Here, 2 is an integer which is converted to float implicitly and you have 2.0.

This implicit type conversion is also called coercion.

Explicit Type Conversion

You could also do explicit number data type conversion using functions like int(), float(), str(), etc.

>>> x = 8
>>> print("Value of x = ", int(x))
Value of x =  8
>>> print("Converted Value of x = ", float(x))
Converted Value of x = 8.0

If you want to convert float value to int value then the decimal part will be truncated.

Python Fractional Numbers

A module named fractions is used to perform operations which involves fractional number. fractions module could represent a fractional number as numerator/denominator.

import fractions

print(fractions.Fraction(0.5))

1 / 2

The Fraction function of the fractions module will convert the decimal into fractions and then you can perform mathematical operations on these fractions:

print(Fraction(0.5) + Fraction(1.5))
print(Fraction(0.5) * Fraction(1.5))
print(Fraction(0.5) / Fraction(1.5))

Result:

2
3 / 4
1 / 3