Convert $userinfo[posts] from a string to a number

[davide101]

First, I've never created a plugin before, so please be gentle!

$userinfo[posts] and $post[posts] outputs a user's posts as a string (why, I don't know). This makes it useless for doing comparisons. I need to create a plugin that will take that output, convert it to a string, and store it in a variable so I can do comparison.

Where exactly do I begin? Is there something out there that does something similar that I can reverse engineer? Do you have any pointers on how to get going?