Unsupported operand types in if/else list comprehension

[Mike H]

Hello all, I have a question about the if/else aspect of list comprehension:

I would like to go through a list and place quotes around an item if
it is a string, and keep the item the same if it's anything else:

e.g.['a',9,'8b'] --> ['"a"', 9, '"8b"']

I understand that if/else list comprehension should be generally:

b=[(F,T)[boolean test] for val in X]

so, I tried the following code:

a=['test',1,'two']
b=[(inst, '"'+inst+'"')[isinstance(inst, str)] for inst in a]

I end up getting the error: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'

>From playing around with other examples, I get the feeling that Python
is calculating both values (inst and '"'+inst+'"') before selecting
which one to pass to the new list. Am I right? Is there any way I can
do this using list comprehension?

Thanks in advance,

Michael