How to find out if a Python object is a string?

Question

How can I check if a Python object is a string (either regular or Unicode)?

Answer 1

You can test it by concatenating with an empty string:

def is_string(s):
  try:
    s += ''
  except:
    return False
  return True

Edit:

Correcting my answer after comments pointing out that this fails with lists

def is_string(s):
  return isinstance(s, basestring)