Assuming module foo
with method bar
:
import foo
method_to_call = getattr(foo, 'bar')
result = method_to_call()
You could shorten lines 2 and 3 to:
result = getattr(foo, 'bar')()
if that makes more sense for your use case.
You can use getattr
in this fashion on class instance bound methods, module-level methods, class methods... the list goes on.
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)):
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