Question

Whats the best way to convert int’s, long’s, double’s to strings and vice versa in python.

I am looping through a list and passing longs to a dict that should be turned into a unicode string.

I do

for n in l:  
    {'my_key':n[0],'my_other_key':n[1]}

Why are some of the most obvious things so complicated?

Answer 1

You could do it like this in Python 2.x:

>>> l = ((1,2),(3,4))
>>> dict(map(lambda n: (n[0], unicode(n[1])), l))
{1: u'2', 3: u'4'}

or in Python 3.x:

>>> l = ((1,2),(3,4))
>>> {n[0] : str(n[1]) for n in l}
{1: '2', 3: '4'}

Note that strings in Python 3 are the same as unicode strings in Python 2.