How Do I Add Numeric Strings in Programming Instead of Concatenating Them?

Concatenation vs. Addition of Numeric Strings

String manipulation in programming involves operations like concatenation, which combines strings, and addition, which calculates the sum of numeric values. However, when dealing with strings representing numbers, it's possible to encounter unexpected behavior if you simply attempt to add them together.

For strings like "20" and "30.5," the default behavior is concatenation. This means that instead of calculating their numerical sum, these strings are appended together, resulting in "2030.5."

To force these strings to be treated as numbers for addition, we can employ the unary plus operator ( ). When applied to a string, the unary plus operator converts it to a number.

By using this operator, we can rewrite our code to correctly add the numeric strings:

+num1 + +num2;

This operation converts both "num1" and "num2" to numbers before performing addition, giving us the expected result: 50.5.

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