how to convert an integer to a float?

[Andrew Koenig]

<yinglcs at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1172621139.954362.196170 at k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi, I have the following functions,  but ' dx = abs(i2 - i1)/min(i2,
> i1)' always return 0, can you please tell me how can i convert it from
> an integer to float?

I don't think that's what you really want to do.

What you really want is for dx to be a float rather than being truncated to 
an integer.  Division is going to behave that way in the future, so if you 
want it to behave that way now, you can write

    from __future__ import division

at the beginning of your program.

If for some reason you don't want to rely on using a version of Python that 
knows about this future behavior, you might consider

    dx = float(abs(i2 - i1))/min(i2, i1)

as an alternative.