Pythonic Way To Check for A Parameter Type

Question

I'm working on a little side project for work and have made some classes and methods. One of the classes represents a shelf in our inventory and another represents each a bin on the shelf. I have a method to add a new bin to the shelf and I added some logic to make sure it was passed a Location object before it is added to the shelf (right now I'm using lists while I develop before moving everything to a DB).

However I just read in a Python book that I have that it is usually better to handle exceptions as they arise rather than add extra code. I removed the logic to see what error I would get but I didn't get anything it allowed a string in place of the Location object.

Is there a more Pythonic way to enforce what type a parameter is?

What I have for the shelf:

class CrossDock:
locations = []

def add_location(self, location):
    if isinstance(location, Location): #if this is commented out it will take what ever is passed to it
        self.locations.append(location)
    else:
        print("location parameter must be of type: Location. Parameter is of type" + str(type(location)))

Is there a way I can do this with a try/except block?

Answer 1

The most pythonic way is to not type check... everything is duck typed.

What's the canonical way to check for type in python?