What is the best way to work with unique item, list and generator

July 18, 2022

I’m create functions that receive as parameter an Int, an array of Int or a generator of Int

Eg.

def render(ids):
    for id in ids:
        ...

I made a function to manage it

def safecast_to_list(obj, force=False):
    try:
        if isinstance(obj, types.GeneratorType) and force:
            return list(obj)
        if not isinstance(obj, list | types.GeneratorType):
            return [obj]
        return obj
    except Exception:
        return []

def render(ids):
    ids = safecast_to_list(ids)
    for id in ids:
        ...

def foo(ids):
    ids = safecast_to_list(ids, force=True)
    ...
    return ids[0]

Is there any other solution that look better than mine ?

>Solution :

Even though Python does not support function overloading out of the box there is a way to do it yourself:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/67830038/10547647

Or use third party library:
https://github.com/bintoro/overloading.py