The original answer below was written in 2008. Since then, Python 3.10 (2021) introduced the match
-case
statement which provides a first-class implementation of a "switch" for Python. For example:
def f(x):
match x:
case 'a':
return 1
case 'b':
return 2
case _:
return 0 # 0 is the default case if x is not found
The match
-case
statement is considerably more powerful than this simple example.
You could use a dictionary:
def f(x):
return {
'a': 1,
'b': 2,
}[x]
To check if o
is an instance of str
or any subclass of str
, use isinstance (this would be the "canonical" way):
if isinstance(o, str):
To check if the type of o
is exactly str
(exclude subclasses):
if type(o) is str:
The following also works, and can be useful in some cases:
if issubclass(type(o), str):
See Built-in Functions in the Python Library Reference for relevant information.
One more note: in this case, if you're using Python 2, you may actually want to use:
if isinstance(o, basestring):
because this will also catch Unicode strings (unicode
is not a subclass of str
; both str
and unicode
are subclasses of basestring
). Note that basestring
no longer exists in Python 3, where there's a strict separation of strings (str
) and binary data (bytes
).
Alternatively, isinstance
accepts a tuple of classes. This will return True
if o
is an instance of any subclass of any of (str, unicode)
:
if isinstance(o, (str, unicode)):
Best Answer
You can create a custom Expected Condition to wait for the URL to change:
The Expected Condition is basically a callable - you can wrap it into a class overwriting the
__call__()
magic method as the built-in conditions are implemented.