how can i check whether a variable is iterable in my code?

[John Machin]

On Sep 20, 8:54 pm, satoru <torainLi... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 20, 6:35 pm, Aidan <ai... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > satoru wrote:
> > > hi, all
> > > i want to check if a variable is iterable like a list, how can i
> > > implement this?
>
> > this would be one way, though I'm sure others exist:
>
> > if hasattr(yourVar, '__iter__'):
> >         # do stuff
>
> thank you,but this will miss out sequences like string just because it
> doesn't have an attribute named '__iter__'

str objects have a __getitem__ attribute, as do other built-in
sequence types: unicode, xrange, buffer.
AFAIK if an object has no __iter__ but has a __getitem__, iter(obj)
will create an iterator that calls obj.__getitem__(0),
obj.__getitem__(1), etc until IndexError is raised.