Course of Raku / Essentials / Data type conversion

Converting types using type coercion methods

To convert, or to coerce a type, call a method with the data type’s name. For example, convert a string into an integer number:

my $howmany = '42';
my $n = $howmany.Int;
say $n;

In many cases, you don’t need to convert values explicitly, as Raku does that job for you. The following code is working correctly and predictably:

my $a = '10';
my $b = '20';
my $c = $a + $b;
say "The result is $c."; # The result is 30.

The two variables, $a and $b, contain strings, but they are used in an arithmetical expression with +. At this point, both strings are converted to integers, and thus $c also gets an integer. A variable containing an integer is interpolated in a string in the last line, where Raku does the necessary operations to present the number as a sequence of digit characters.