How to check if variable is a string?

Question

I want to use validation for the variable 'name' to make sure that the user is typing in words.

My ineffective solution:

name = input("What is your name").lower()
if name[0] == "a" or "b" or "c" or "d" or "e" #etc..:
    print("Success")
else:
    print("You must type in letters!")

Your other issue is that you need to use `==` to test for equality; `=` is for assignment — roganjosh, Aug 19 '18 at 14:50
Is this Python 2 or Python 3? Because `input` has completely different semantics, and the question can be interpreted in different ways... — Matteo Italia, Aug 19 '18 at 14:53
Please don't tag as 2.7 in future if your issue is in 3.x because we rely on those tags to determine which version you are using. — roganjosh, Aug 19 '18 at 14:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 19 '18 at 14:52

You may be looking for str.isalpha(), which returns true iff all the characters in a string are alphabetic.

(As an aside, to find out whether an object is a string is done with isinstance(x, str).)

>>> 'x'.isalpha()
True
>>> '6'.isalpha()
False
>>> '-'.isalpha()
False
>>> 'hello'.isalpha()
True

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '18 at 14:53

0

Try str.isalpha()

Replace str with the user input. Returns true if entered value is a string otherwise false.

answered Aug 19 '18 at 14:53

devm

227
1
12

How to check if variable is a string?

2 Answers2