How to Know if an Object is an Iterable in Python

According to the Python documentation:

The only reliable way to determine whether an object is iterable is to call iter(obj).

Therefore, always prefer using the try-except method to identify an object as an iterable.

Using try-except

def is_iterable(item):
    try:
        iter(item)
        return True
    except TypeError:
        return False

Using hasattr

This is a straightforward way but can be a bit hard to read.

hasattr(item, "__iter__") # True / False

Using isinstance

This method is more readable.

from collections.abc import Iterable

isinstance(item, Iterable) # True / False

However, collections.abc.Iterable does not consider the legacy __getitem__ method – which is sufficient to create an iterable –, unlike an iter() call handling a TypeError exception.

References

• Python official documentation on collections.abc.Iterable