Check if object is a number or boolean

> Design a logical expression equivalent to the following statement: > > x is a list of three or five elements, the second element of which is > the string 'Hip' and the first of which is not a number or Boolean.

What I have:

x = ['Head', 'Hip', 10]
print x[1] is 'Hip'

My question: How do you check for whether or not it is a Boolean or a number?

To answer the specific question:

isinstance(x[0], (int, float))

This checks if x[0] is an instance of any of the types in the tuple (int, float).

You can add bool in there, too, but it's not necessary, because bool is itself a subclass of int.

Doc reference:

• isinstance()
• built-in numeric types

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To comment on your current code, you shouldn't rely on interning of short strings. You are supposed to compare strings with the == operator:

x[1] == 'Hip'

Easiest i would say:

type(x) == type(True)

In python3 this would be: type(x)==bool see example.

Python 2

import types

x = False
print(type(x) == types.BooleanType) # True

Python 3

# No need to import types module
x = False
print(type(x) == bool) # True

You should compare the type of x to the bool class:

type(x) == bool

or:

type(x) == type(True)

Here is more on the type method

From Data model docs:

> Booleans (bool) > > These represent the truth values False and True. The two objects representing the values False and True are the only Boolean objects. The Boolean type is a subtype of the integer type, and Boolean values behave like the values 0 and 1, respectively, in almost all contexts, the exception being that when converted to a string, the strings "False" or "True" are returned, respectively.

I follow the recent answer who tell to use type and it seems to be the incorrect way according to pylint validation:

I got the message:

> C0123: Using type() instead of isinstance() for a typecheck. > (unidiomatic-typecheck)

Even if it's an old answer, the correct one is the accepted answer of @Lev Levitsky:

isinstance(x[0], (int, float))

I like to keep it simple to read.. This will accept bool, string, number and read it to a bool

def var2bool(v):
if type(v) == type(True):
    res = v
elif type(v) == type(0):
    if v == 0:
        res = False
    else:
        res = True
elif v.lower() in ("yes", "true", "t", "1"):
    res = True
else:
    res = False
return res