hasattr() or "x in y"?

[Charles T. Smith]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2016 22:00:41 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> Since they behave differently, perhaps the question ought to be "which
> does what you want to do?"

For parsed msgs, I had this:

              elif hasattr (msg.msgBody, 'request'):

It occurred to me that this was less abstruse:

              elif 'request' in msg.msgBody:

and by the way, how would you do that with duck-typing?
If I were doing this anew, I probably use a dictionary of functors,
but that's not an option anymore.