[Baypiggies] Newbie-ish type questions...

[Keith Dart]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Charles Merriam wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've been creating a growing number of type functions of the form:
>
> def is_list(l):
>    return type(l) is list
>
> def is_string(s):
>    return isinstance(s, basestring)
>
> def is_iter(i):
>    return hasattr(i, "next") and hasattr(i, "__iter__")
>
> ...etc., etc.
>
> I feel like I must of missed something when I learned Python.  Is
> there a simple call I'm missing for
> these?  Does this get better in 3.0?

There is the "types" module, that has the types of most Python objects.

However, I really don't see much difference between these:

if is_list(l):
    pass

if type(l) is list:
    pass

And you also save a function call when using the latter.



However, it is probably preferrable to do this:

if isinstance(l, list):
    pass

since that will also catch subclasses of list.

Even better, do type checking sparingly.



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    Keith Dart <keith at dartworks.biz>
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