Counterintuitive behaviour of int() in python

Question

It\'s clearly stated in the docs that int(number) is a flooring type conversion:

int(1.23)
1

and int(string) returns an int if and only if the

Answer 1

This is almost certainly a case of applying three of the principles from the Zen of Python:

Explicit is better implicit.

[...] practicality beats purity

Errors should never pass silently

Some percentage of the time, someone doing int('1.23') is calling the wrong conversion for their use case, and wants something like float or decimal.Decimal instead. In these cases, it's clearly better for them to get an immediate error that they can fix, rather than silently giving the wrong value.

In the case that you do want to truncate that to an int, it is trivial to explicitly do so by passing it through float first, and then calling one of int, round, trunc, floor or ceil as appropriate. This also makes your code more self-documenting, guarding against a later modification "correcting" a hypothetical silently-truncating int call to float by making it clear that the rounded value is what you want.