Coercing one object to type of another

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 10:23 PM, Vijay Shanker <deontics at gmail.com> wrote:
> well it will always return me this:
> <type 'str'>
>
> what i want is if i know arg1 is of string type(and it can be of any type, say list, int,float) and arg2 is of any type, how can i convert it to type of arg1,
> if arg1='hello world', type(arg1).__name__ will give me 'str', can i use this to convert my arg2 to this type, w/o resorting to if-elif conditions as there will be too many if-elif-else and it doesn really sounds a great idea !

Oh, okay. Then switch the order of the arguments in what I posted:

def coerce(target,convertme):
    return type(target)(convertme)

You don't need to worry about the actual name of the type. It's
telling you that it's <type 'str'>; that's an actual callable object
(the same as the builtin name str, in this case). You can then call
that to coerce the other argument to that type.

ChrisA