Course Content
C# Basics
C# Basics
Basic Type Conversion
We learnt about Type Casting in the last chapter however we cannot deal with strings in type casting.
For-example, if we have a string which represents a number such as "1234"
, and we want to perform arithmetic operations on it, we cannot do that without converting it into a numerical data type. To do that we can use a method called Type Conversion.
Type Conversion can be done using a relevant Convert
method. We will explore methods in detail in later sections however for understanding purposes, methods are essentially commands that tell the computer to perform a certain operation.
We can convert a string
to an int
using the Convert.ToInt32()
method. The syntax of the method is following:
main
Convert.ToInt32(dataToConvert);
Example:
main
Convert.ToInt32("12345");
This method takes in a value, converts it into an integer if possible, and returns that value in integer form which we can either store in variables or display directly:
main
using System; namespace ConsoleApp { internal class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int val = Convert.ToInt32("12345"); Console.WriteLine(val); Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToInt32("67890")); } } }
Note that the string must contain an integer number in the correct format which means there must be no extra spaces or symbols in the value, otherwise it will show an error:
main
Convert.ToInt32("3.14"); // Error Convert.ToInt32(""); // Error Convert.ToInt32("30,000"); // Error
Another point to note that any kind of value can be passed into the Convert
function as long as it can logically be converted to an int
:
main
using System; namespace ConsoleApp { internal class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int val = Convert.ToInt32(1234.567); Console.WriteLine(val); // The value is rounded to the nearest integer. } } }
To convert an int
to string
, we can use the Convert.ToString()
method:
main
using System; namespace ConsoleApp { internal class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int number = 1234567; string text = Convert.ToString(number); Console.WriteLine(text); // Output: 1234567 } } }
Following is a list of the commonly used Convert
methods:
Method | Operation |
Convert.ToInt32() | Convert a value to an integer |
Convert.ToInt64() | Convert a value to long |
Convert.ToDouble() | Convert a value to double |
Convert.ToString() | Convert a value to string |
Everything was clear?