I am looking for a general way to refer to particular digits in a integer or string, I need to be able to perform different operations on alternating digits and sum the result of all of those returned values.
Any help is much appreciated
Oh and I am a complete beginner so idiot-proof answers would be appreciated.
I will elaborate, is there any inbuilt function on Python that could reduce an integer into a list of it's digits, I have looked to no avail and I was hoping someone here would understand what I was asking, sorry to be so vague but I do not know enough of Python yet to provide a very in-depth question.
If you're starting with an integer, first convert it to a string; you can't address the digits within an integer conveniently:
>>> myint = 979
>>> mystr = str(myint)
>>> mystr
'979'
Address individual digits with their index in square brackets, starting from zero:
>>> mystr[1]
'7'
Convert those digits back to integers if you need to do math on them:
>>> int(mystr[1])
7
And if you're just doing a numerological summation, list comprehensions are convenient:
>>> sum( [ int(x) for x in mystr ] )
25
Just keep in mind that when you're considering individual digits, you're working with strings, and when you're doing arithmetic, you're working with integers, so this kind of thing requires a lot of conversion back and forth.