Python determine whether variable is number when can be string or int?

Question

I have variable passed in which can be a string or integer passed in. For example it can be '123' or 123. Additionally, it could be a string like 'N/A', and in this case I want to replace it with 0.

I have been trying to do something like this:

our_value = int(our_value) if our_value.isdigit() else 0

The issue is when our_value is an integer it has no method isdigit. If it's a string this will work fine.

How can I handle both cases where it can be a integer or string?

Answer 1

This will work as well

try:
    our_value = int(our_value)
except ValueError:
   our_value = 0

Answer 2

To avoid double conversions it is possible to use a try/except construction such as:

try:
    our_value = int(our_value)
except ValueError:
    our_value = 0

In this case, we try to coerce the value to an integer. This will be successful if we have an integer already, or a string that can be interpreted as an integer.

Other strings will fall into our except case and thereby set to 0.