Convert from String to Integer to Float and back again

As you read values off a site, there will come a time when you need to manipulate them, such as performing calculations or making comparisons. That doesn’t seem to be problem until you end up with Strings being compared to Integers.

For the most part, a value read off a page will be a string because you don’t always know what it contains. For example, “New Sales Company” is a string of characters. On the other side, 537273 is a number. However, $537,273, which you can identify as numbers is actually a  String value as far as the code is concerned.

Even after you remove the dollar sign and comma, the value type will still be treated as a string because that’s how it was initially read. Comparing a string to an integer will cause a mismatch, but there is a simple way to handle that.

The ValueOf() statement allows the comparison of values as a certain type. Taking the example above, it would be read from the site as a string. We would then remove the $ and , with the ReplaceAll statement – replaceAll(“[\$,]”, “”)

As noted, that would give 537273, but it is still a string. If we wanted to see if the value was greater than 500000 or add another number to it, we can use Integer.valueOf() as in – siteDailyGrossProfit=Integer.valueOf(tempText).

This would set the variable siteDailyGrossProfit to the Integer value of tempText, which would be the dollar figure we read from the site. Because the result will be an integer, this will set siteDailyGrossProfit as an Integer.

The same would be done within an IF statement to verify if the value read is less than or equal to 0. In my test case, if a value is $0, there is an issue and I want to do something about it. Once the value is read, an IF statement would be set up as:

if (Integer.valueOf(dailySalesFigure)<=0)

The same type of conversion holds true for String and Float values. As an example, calculatedMargin=(((Float.valueOf(GP) / Float.valueOf(sales)) * 100).round(1)) – calculates a percentage and rounds the result to 1 decimal place. The values were read as string, but can be multiplied and divided as Float values.

String works the same way, such as the random number example we used earlier:

WebUI.setText(findTestObject(‘Page_/Sales Plan Budget/New Prospect/Category Margin Column’, [(‘Variable’) : loop]), String.valueOf(randomNumber))

A variant is to use .toInteger, .toFloat() and .toString. In this case, the variable tempText reads the value 123456 off the site. Converting to the different types would look like:

intValue = tempText.toInteger() – Would return 123456 as an Integer

stringValue = tempText.toString() – Would return 123456 as a String

floatValue = tempText.toFloat() – Would return 123456.0 as a Float

As a final example, using a command similar to the Selenium IDE, the following will convert a value to a Integer:

intValue = Integer.parseInt(strnumber)