Converting Integers To Strings

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, in this video I want to talk about converting integers to strings.
• 00:07 Now, there are many times when you might have an integer and
• 00:10 you need to convert it to a string for any number of reasons.
• 00:12 Not going to get into why you might want to do that in this video, but
• 00:15 there are times when you want to do that.
• 00:17 How can we do that?
• 00:18 So let's start out with an integer.
• 00:20 I'm going to create an integer, let's just call it x, and set it equal to 41.
• 00:24 Now, let's also create a string, let's call it y, and
• 00:28 maybe we haven't assigned anything to it yet.
• 00:31 So let's say we want to put whatever is in our x variable into this y string, and
• 00:36 use it as a string, how do we do that?
• 00:39 Well, you might think you just might want to go y = x, right?
• 00:43 So then if we come down here and just try to print out y, and then run this,
• 00:47 we get an error.
• 00:49 And when we click on this thing to see, it says,
• 00:52 you cannot implicitly convert type int to string.
• 00:55 So a lot of programming languages will let you just do something like this, and
• 01:00 it will convert it for you.
• 01:01 Not so with C#, we have to be very specific.
• 01:04 But there's an actual function that we can use that will convert
• 01:06 something to a string.
• 01:08 And we can use that, and it is the .toString() function.
• 01:14 So here, we can set our y, which we've already declared as a string.
• 01:18 And instead of just calling this y = x,
• 01:22 we can call y = x.toString(),
• 01:26 like that, and then now we can print this out.
• 01:31 So let's go ahead and run this guy, and when we do, we see 41.
• 01:35 Now, is that an integer?
• 01:37 Is it a string?
• 01:38 We can't really tell by looking at it.
• 01:40 It looks like an integer.
• 01:42 But we know, if we concatenate a string with another number,
• 01:47 say 10, it will not add, right?
• 01:50 Strings can't add.
• 01:51 It will just smoosh them together.
• 01:53 We've seen that in prior videos, right?
• 01:54 So, if this has actually converted it to a string,
• 01:58 it should print out something like 4110,
• 02:02 which is just 41, which is our guy right here,
• 02:06 smooshed together with this 10, also treated as a string.
• 02:11 And yeah, that's all there is to it.
• 02:13 So let's go ahead and save this and run it, see if that worked.
• 02:17 Sure enough 4110, all smooshed together, definitely not added.
• 02:22 Now, if we undid this, and changed this back to x,
• 02:27 now this would add 41 and 10, right?
• 02:32 And we should just get 51, which we do.
• 02:36 So that's what happens when they're integers.
• 02:41 When they're not integers, for instance, when we convert it to a string,
• 02:44 it'll be as we just saw, smooshed together, not added at all.
• 02:48 And in fact, that's what we get.
• 02:49 So that's how you can convert integers to strings.
• 02:52 Very handy to use this all the time for all kinds of weird things, and
• 02:55 pretty simple with this .toString() function.
• 02:58 So, that's all for this video.
• 02:59 In the next video, we'll dive into this a little bit deeper and
• 03:02 talk about type conversion and casting.

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