Question

What is the easiest way to check if something is a list?

A method doSomething has the parameters a and b. In the method, it will loop through the list a and do something. I’d like a way to make sure a is a list, before looping through – thus avoiding an error or the unfortunate circumstance of passing in a string then getting back a letter from each loop.

This question must have been asked before – however my googles failed me. Cheers.

Answer 1

To enable more usecases, but still treat strings as scalars, don’t check for a being a list, check that it isn’t a string:

if not isinstance(a, basestring):
    ...