The Daily WTF

Today’s anonymous submitter is an experienced Python developer. Their team is significantly less experienced. In the interests of training, someone suggested, “Perhaps we should buy books for everyone.” Our submitter was handed a stack of possible books, and asked to pick the best one to help the team mature.

One book spent some time discussing types, and the conversion between them. By way of example, it provided a handy method which would turn a string into a floating point number:

def str_int(s): val = “%.2f” % profit return float(val)

According to the book, this method turns a string into a float, which is why it’s called str_int.

“%.2f” % profit is one of several Python string formatting conventions, and it will take the contents of the variable profit and substitute them where the % appears in the string. In this case, it will be formatted as a floating

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