Identifying the data type of an input

python python-3.x types user-input python-3.2
Apeiron Kambyses picture Apeiron Kambyses · Mar 5, 2014 · Viewed 20.7k times · Source

Hi I am trying to print the data type of a user input and produce a table like following:

ABCDEFGH = String, 1.09 = float, 0 = int, true = bool

, etc. I'm using python 3.2.3 and I know I could use type() to get the type of the data but in python all user inputs are taken as strings and I don't know how to determine whether the input is a string or Boolean or integer or float. Here is that part of the code:

user_var = input("Please enter something: ")
print("you entered " + user_var)
print(type(user_var))

which always returns str for string. Appreciate any help

Answer

thefourtheye picture thefourtheye · Mar 5, 2014 
from ast import literal_eval

def get_type(input_data):
    try:
        return type(literal_eval(input_data))
    except (ValueError, SyntaxError):
        # A string, so return str
        return str

print(get_type("1"))        # <class 'int'>
print(get_type("1.2354"))   # <class 'float'>
print(get_type("True"))     # <class 'bool'>
print(get_type("abcd"))     # <class 'str'>

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