Noob question: Is all this typecasting normal?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

sprad schrieb:
> I've done a good bit of Perl, but I'm new to Python.
> 
> I find myself doing a lot of typecasting (or whatever this thing I'm
> about to show you is called), and I'm wondering if it's normal, or if
> I'm missing an important idiom.

It is normal, although below you make things needlessly complicated.

Python is strongly typed, which is a good thing. It refuses to guess you 
mean when you multiply a string with a number. Or how a number is to be 
formatted when printed.

> For example:
> 
> bet = raw_input("Enter your bet")
> if int(bet) == 0:
>     # respond to a zero bet


You might better do

bet = int(raw_input("Enter your bet"))

because then you don't need to later on convert bet again and again.

But *one* conversion you need.

> Or later, I'll have an integer, and I end up doing something like
> this:
> 
> print "You still have $" + str(money) + " remaining"

This is more concisely & with much better control over the output-format 
(think e.g. digits of a fraction) using string-interpolation. See

http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting-operations

for an overview.

In your case, a simple

print "You still have $%i remaining" % bet

does the trick.

Diez