How to check if a string "is" an int?

[Erik Max Francis]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> In that case, the name is misleadingly wrong. I suppose it is not likely
> that it could be changed before Python 3?

Why?

The primary purpose of the .isdigit, etc. methods is to test whether a 
single character has a certain property.  There is, however, no special 
character data type in Python, and so by necessity those methods must be 
on strings, not characters.

Thus, you have basically two choices:  Have the methods throw exceptions 
for strings with a length different from one, or have them just iterate 
over every character in a string.  The latter is clearly a more useful 
functionality.

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