As you can’t change the type of variable straight when working inside a Django template and you can only do it to the variables going TO the template, I found a stupid work around it.

Say you have variable a = ‘2′ and b = 2 and you want to compare them. The way I did it was adding the same value to both variables, thus changing the string variable into an integer by adding a filter. Might not be the best solution in the world but it worked.

Not working:
{% ifequal a b %}
HTML stuff 'round here
{% endifequal%}

Working:
{% ifequal a|add:"0" b|add:"0" %}
HTML stuff 'round here
{% endifequal %}

It does look a little bit silly but it might do the trick if you’re too lazy to change your views/models.