It's me wrote:
The argument I wish to pass is either one string, or a list of strings, or a tuple of strings.
def seq(x):
if hasattr(x,"__iter__"):
return x
else:
return (x,)
def abc(arg1, arg2, arg3):
for item in seq(arg2):
print item
Note that this takes advantage of the fact that str and unicode implement iteration through the old __getitem__ protocol instead of the __iter__ protocol. It's actually probably the most concise solution to your problem, but I don't think there's any guarantee that str and unicode won't grow __iter__ methods in the future, so you might find that this code breaks in some future version of Python (probably in the fabled Python 3.0). Unfortunately, if this does happen, it won't break with an exception; it will break by treating the characters in strings as 'item's.
For the moment though (and I suspect in Python 2.5 as well since I haven't heard anyone lobbying to add __iter__ methods to str or unicode), this should work fine for you.
Steve -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
