>> I want to know what type is a variable.
>
> You should try to treat it as a list, catch the exceptions
> raise when it is a string (problably ValueError, TypeError ou
> Attribute error, depends on what are you doing), and then
> treat it as a string. This is the BAFP (better ask for
> forgiveness than permission) style
One might prefer to check for string-ness, as strings can
duck-type somewhat like lists:
my_list = ['my', 'brain', 'hurts']
my_string = 'Are you the brain specialist?'
for test in [my_list, my_string]:
try:
for thing in test:
process_list_item(thing)
except Exception: #whatever flavor you want
process_string(thing) # not called because
#strings are iterable
This gives the potentially-surprising result of iterating over
my_string and calling process_list_item() with each character in
the string, rather than raising some exception and calling
process_string(). Python does the right thing, but it can be
confusing when the duck-typing syntax is identical for the two,
despite a desire to treat them differently...perhaps a tree-like
list of lists and strings such as HTML/XML structure.
-tkc
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