How to change the data type of all elements of a Python list

Question

I want to compute the sum of all elements of a list, but the elements are text. E.g. ['1','0','1']. How can I change the data type of all elements to 'int' so that I can apply sum() function.?

Answer 1

There can be several ways to change the data type of list elements. You can try the following two one-liner pythonic approaches:

>>> a=['aa','1','0','1']

>>> map(int,a[1:])
[1, 0, 1]
>>> [int(s) for s in a[1:]]
[1, 0, 1]

To compute the sum of the list items, you can do one of the followings:

>>> sum(map(int,a[1:]))
2
>>> sum([int(s) for s in a[1:]])
2