Chris Mellon wrote: > You should "check" for the methods by calling them. If the object > doesn't support the method in question, you will get a runtime > exception. Premature inspection of an object is rarely useful and > often outright harmful.
That makes sense, thank you for the response. What about the case where I have an array of objects that represent some particular binary file format. If the object is a file, then I want to copy its contents. If the object is a string, then I want to write the string. And so forth. Should I assume that an object is file-like if it has a read method, and that I can call the read method without unexpected side effects? Ben -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list