Unlike many other programming languages out there, Python does not implicitly typecast integers (or floats) to strings when you concatenate them to strings.

Fortunately, Python has a handy built-in function str() which will convert the argument passed in to a string format.

The Wrong Way to Convert a String to an Integer in Python

Programmers coming from other programming languages may attempt to do the following string concatenation, which will produce an error:

age = 18

string = "Hello, I am " + age + " years old"

You can run this code on repl.it.

The error that shows up is:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "python", line 3, in <module>
TypeError: must be str, not int

Here, TypeError: must be str, not int indicates that the integer must first be converted to a string before it can be concatenated.

The Correct Way to Convert a String to an Integer in Python

Here's a simple concatenation example:

age = 18

print("Hello, I am " + str(age) + " years old")

# Output
# Hello, I am 18 years old

You can run this code on repl.it.

Here's how to print 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 using a single string:

result = ""

for i in range(1, 11):
    result += str(i) + " "

print(result)

# Output
# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

You can run the code on repl.it.

Here's a line-by-Line explanation of how the above code works:

  1. First of all a variable ‘result’ is assigned to an empty string.
  2. The for loop is being used to iterate over a list of numbers.
  3. This list of numbers is generated using the range function.
  4. so range(1,11) is going to generate a list of numbers from 1 to 10.
  5. On each for loop iteration this ‘i’ variable is going to take up values from 1 to 10.
  6. On first iteration when the variable i=1,then the variable [result=result+str(i)+“(space character)”],str(i) converts the ‘i’ which is an integer value to a string value.
  7. Since i=1, on the first iteration finally result=1.
  8. And the same process goes on until i=10 and finally after the last iteration result=1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.
  9. Therefore when we finally print the result after the for loop the output on the console is ‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10’.

I hope you've found this helpful. Happy coding.