Python counting with str and int

Question

Everyone, hello!

I'm not able to count properly, and I'm at a loss. A second pair of eyes would really be helpful.

I'm getting a variable from my config file as:

import ConfigParser
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read("config.ini")
count1 = config.get('Counter','count1')
>>> print count1
5

However, when I want to simply substract - 1 from this variable, as so:

count1 = (count1 - 1)

I'm confronted with an error:

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'str' and 'int'

Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can't do arithmetic with strings, you have to convert it first to an integer with the int function:

count1 = int(config.get('Counter', 'count1'))

You could also use the config.getint or config.getfloat methods.

If you need a float, you can use the float function instead.