Prompting user for number, reading number, squaring it and returning result

[gruntfutuk]

Hi gontajones. Thank you for your reply.
Listen, I am new to Python. I have taken a couple of online courses that lasted a few hours each. Now I need to code.
Having said that, this is what I have done:

input("Enter a number")
user_answer = input("Enter a number")
user_answer_squared = user_answer**2
print(user_answer_squared)

In Python 3.x (which I hope you are using) ALL input is a string. That is, a series of unicode characters that Python does not treat as a numeric value.

You need to tell Python to cast a string to the kind of number you want. IF the string is not valid as a number, an exception will be raised and your programme will halt with an error message.

num = int(user_answer)

will attempt to convert the string referenced by user_answer into an integer referenced by num which you can then use in your subsequent code.

You can use float() to cast to a floating point number.