Lexical cast from string to type

Question

Recently, I was trying to store and read information from files in Python, and came across a slight problem: I wanted to read type information from text files. Type casting

Answer 1

I like using locate, which works on built-in types:

>>> from pydoc import locate
>>> locate('int')

>>> t = locate('int')
>>> t('1')
1

...as well as anything it can find in the path:

>>> locate('datetime.date')

>>> d = locate('datetime.date')
>>> d(2015, 4, 23)
datetime.date(2015, 4, 23)

...including your custom types:

>>> locate('mypackage.model.base.BaseModel')

>>> m = locate('mypackage.model.base.BaseModel')
>>> m()