Converting from a string to boolean in Python?

Question

Does anyone know how to do convert from a string to a boolean in Python? I found this link. But it doesn't look like a proper way to do it. I.e. using built-in functionality, etc.

The reason I'm asking this is because I learned about int("string") from here. But when trying bool("string") it always returns True:

>>> bool("False") True 

Answer 1

Really, you just compare the string to whatever you expect to accept as representing true, so you can do this:

s == 'True' 

Or to checks against a whole bunch of values:

s.lower() in ['true', '1', 't', 'y', 'yes', 'yeah', 'yup', 'certainly', 'uh-huh'] 

Be cautious when using the following:

>>> bool("foo") True >>> bool("") False 

Empty strings evaluate to False, but everything else evaluates to True. So this should not be used for any kind of parsing purposes.