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

Perhaps this is what you want, it looks into builtin types only:

def gettype(name):
    t = getattr(__builtins__, name)
    if isinstance(t, type):
        return t
    raise ValueError(name)