Question

Given this string

random_string= '4'

i want to determine if its an integer, a character or just a word
i though i could do this

test = int(random_string)
isinstance(test,int) == True

but i realized if the random_string does not contain a number i will have an error

basically the random_string can be of the forms

random_string ='hello'
random_string ='H'
random_string ='r'
random_string ='56'

anyone know a way to do this, kind of confused, for determine is its a character what i did was

chars = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
random_string in chars == True

i did another string to check if it was a lowercase letter.
also to check if its a word, i took the length of the string, if the length is more than one i determine that it is a word or a number

issue is how can i check if its a word or a number

please help

Answer 1

Strings have methods isalpha and isdigit to test if they consist of letters and digits, respectively:

>>> 'hello'.isalpha()
True
>>> '123'.isdigit()
True

Note that they only check for those characters, so a string with spaces or anything else will return false for both:

>>> 'hi there'.isalpha()
False

However, if you want the value as a number, you’re better off just using int. Note that there’s no point checking with isinstance whether the result is indeed an integer. If int(blah) succeeds, it will always return an integer; if the string doesn’t represent an integer, it will raise an exception.