Question

I’m calculating the conversion from an integer to a binary number wrong. I entered the integer 6 and got back the binary number 0. which is definitely wrong. Can you guys help out? I’m using python 3 by the way.

def ConvertNtoBinary(n):

    binaryStr = ''
    if n < 0:
        print('Value is a negative integer')

    if n == 0:
        print('Binary value of 0 is 0')
    else:
        if n > 0:
            binaryStr = str(n % 2) + binaryStr
            n = n > 1
    return binaryStr

def main():
    n = int(input('Enter a positive integer please: '))
    binaryNumber = ConvertNtoBinary(n)
    print('n converted to a binary number is: ',binaryNumber)

main()

Answer 1

The problem here is:

n = n > 1

This does the boolean comparison “is n greater than 1?”. What you likely want is n >> 1, which bitshifts n.

EDIT: Also, you’re only doing this process once – I imagine you’ll want to do it on some condition, like

while n > 0:

EDIT2: The comment form John Machin is correct, and I fixed the above to reflect that.