Function Overloading Without Typechecking

[Fernando Pérez]

Emile van Sebille wrote:


> I look to make a function that will do the right thing for the
> allowable args and then use it.  For your example, something
> like:
> 
>>>> def tolist(arg):
>  return filter(None, [a.strip() for a in list(arg)])
> 
>>>> tolist('a b c')
> ['a', 'b', 'c']
>>>> tolist(['a','b','c'])
> ['a', 'b', 'c']
> 

But your version does:
In [21]: tolist('a bcd e')
Out[21]=
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

while I think he'd want:

In [22]: 'a bcd e'.split()
Out[22]=
['a', 'bcd', 'e']

I'm *very* interested in an elegant, 'pythonic' solution to this, as I tend 
to do a lot of what the original poster does and would love to learn of a 
better, more robust way to do it.

Thanks,

f.