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Python Python Basics (2015) Logic in Python Try and Except

Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points
Posted by Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points

How do you convert arguments to floats before returning them?

See the example for the code that I am trying to work through—I can't convert the arguments to floats before returning them. I've Googled around and can't seem to find an answer that makes sense to me, a super noob.

trial.py 
def add(5, 3):
  float(5, 3)
  return(5 + 3)

2 Answers

Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points
Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points

God job Benjamin! :thumbsup: There is a couple exceptions, though. Firstly, for names (variable names, function names, etc.) there are a couple rules:

  • Names can't start with a number, but the other characters can
  • They also cannot contain a special character such as the question mark, period, or comma
  • They can't have spaces, but they CAN have underscores ( _ )

This means these names are valid:

  • hello
  • var1
  • hello_and_bye

And these are invalid:

  • 1hello
  • right?
  • hello and bye

For your second problem, don't get confused when the challenge says "Make your numbers float before adding them together", this means that you should do t WHILE you are calculating. To complete the task, try this code snippet:

def add(a, b):
  return float(a) + float(b)

Hope that helps! :dizzy:

Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points
Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points

Definitely helps. I really appreciate it. I'll run it and see what happens. Thanks!

Idan Melamed
Idan Melamed
16,285 Points
Idan Melamed
Idan Melamed
16,285 Points

Hi Benjamin, Being super noob is awesome... It sounds much better then a regular noob!

To turn an argument (which is a variable that's has been passed to a function) to float you call the float() function, which takes an argument and returns it as a float. You then need to assign what the float() function returns back to the argument. Like this:

arg = float(arg)

So for that challenge you either do:

def add(arg1, arg2):
  arg1 = float(arg1)
  arg2 = float(arg2)
  return arg1 + arg2

Or you can do the shorthand version like this:

def add(arg1, arg2):
  return float(arg1) + float(arg2)
Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points
Benjamin Peters
Benjamin Peters
552 Points

Thank you so much! This was really helpful.