Robert Dailey wrote:
> Is there a way to force a specific parameter in a function to be a
> specific type? For example, say the first parameter in a function of
> mine is required to be a string. If the user passes in an integer, I
> want to notify them that they should pass in a string, not an integer.
In Python, you generally don't want to do this. If I have code like::
def foo(x):
if not isinstance(x, basestring):
raise ValueError('x must be a string')
return x.split()
then if someone creates a string-like object that doesn't subclass from
basestring, my code raises an exception even though the string-like
object had a .split() method and would have worked perfectly. If you
really feel like you need to give a specific error message, you could
write it instead like::
def foo(x):
try:
split = x.split
except AttributeError:
raise ValueError('x needs to have a split() method')
return split()
But generally there's no reason to do that because the AttributeError
itself would have said almost exactly the same thing.
Long story short: checking parameter types is un-Pythonic. Don't do it.
STeVe
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
