Python provides builtin functions that explicitly convert between data types. This is commonly known as casting. It is often necessary to cast values when they are used as arguments in a function call. It is generally necessary to cast values whenever a function or other process cannot implicitly convert a given variable to the appropriate datatype. For example when printing a string followed by a numeric type the numeric type must be cast to a string for string concatenation in the print() call to work.

float(variable)  is used to cast values to the float type. Casting an int like 12 to a float will a decimal place like 12.0 . Casting a string to float will convert numeric strings like "123.45" to float values like 123.45.

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