Question

I have a method that takes a list of strings. Unfortunately, if the list is only one item long, Python treats this list as a string.

This post has a method for checking whether something is a string, and converting it to a list if it is:
Python: How to define a function that gets a list of strings OR a string

But this seems an incredibly redundant way of getting the item that I passed in as a list to in fact be a list. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I’m not sure I believe you, python shouldn’t behave that way, and it doesn’t appear to:

>>> def foo(lst):
    print type(lst)

>>> foo(['bar'])
<type 'list'>

That post was about a different thing, they wanted the ability to pass a single string or a list of strings and handle both cases as if they were lists of strings. If you’re only passing in a list, always treating it as a list should be fine.