How can I tell if a python variable is a string or a list?

Question

I have a routine that takes a list of strings as a parameter, but I\'d like to support passing in a single string and converting it to a list of one string. For example:

Answer 1

If you have more control over the caller, then one of the other answers is better. I don't have that luxury in my case so I settled on the following solution (with caveats):

def islistlike(v):
   """Return True if v is a non-string sequence and is iterable. Note that
   not all objects with getitem() have the iterable attribute"""
   if hasattr(v, '__iter__') and not isinstance(v, basestring):
       return True
   else:
       #This will happen for most atomic types like numbers and strings
       return False

This approach will work for cases where you are dealing with a know set of list-like types that meet the above criteria. Some sequence types will be missed though.