hasattr() or "x in y"?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2016-03-11, Charles T. Smith <cts.private.yahoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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:

If you want to know if msg.msgBody has an attribute named 'request'
then use hasattr().

If you want to know if msg.msgBody "contains"[1] the string 'request'
then use "in".

_They're_two_different_things_

[1] for some definition of "contains" that depends on the type of
msg.msgBody.

> and by the way, how would you do that with duck-typing?

Do WHAT?

> If I were doing this anew, I probably use a dictionary of functors,
> but that's not an option anymore.

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