typechecks: just say no! (was Re: Determining Types)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
> I suppose it might be the way you've written it, but I don't actually call
> an extra function to perform the comparison.  I just code the test inline:
>
>     if type(var) is not types.StringType:
>         var = str(var)

oh, that's lame ;-)

str does the same thing, but in C.  from the documentation:

    str(object)

    Return a string containing a nicely printable representation
    of an object. For strings, this returns the string itself.

same goes for int(), float(), long(), and tuple() (but not list())

</F>

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