how to tell a variable is iterable but not a string

Question

I have a function that take an argument which can be either a single item or a double item:

def iterable(arg)
    if #arg is an iterable:
        print \"yes         


        

Answer 1

2.x

I would have suggested:

hasattr(x, '__iter__')

or in view of David Charles' comment tweaking this for Python3, what about:

hasattr(x, '__iter__') and not isinstance(x, (str, bytes))

3.x

the builtin basestring abstract type was removed. Use str instead. The str and bytes types don’t have functionality enough in common to warrant a shared base class.