I'm fairly new to pylint and I've followed all the suggestions to clean up my code and make it more readable. But there's one error I can't get rid of in this piece of code:

def api_put(api_path, payload):

"""This function makes PUT requests to the api"""

if api_path.startswith("http"):

url = api_path

else:

url = SERVICE_URL + api_path

The error I'm getting is:

[pylint] E1102:api_path.startswith is not callable

I checked but there's not much info about it:

http://pylint-messages.wikidot.com/messages:e1102

The code works because the argument api_path is a string, so it indeed is callable. Of course if I change it to:

if str(api_path).startswith("http"):

Then the error disappear. But I already know it is a string, and I've always read you shouldn't type-check in Python.

Can anyone shed some light? Thanks!