how to tell a variable is iterable but not a string

by

Use isinstance (I don’t see why it’s bad practice)

import types
if not isinstance(arg, types.StringTypes):

Note the use of StringTypes. It ensures that we don’t forget about some obscure type of string.

On the upside, this also works for derived string classes.

class MyString(str):
    pass

isinstance(MyString("  "), types.StringTypes) # true

Also, you might want to have a look at this previous question.

Cheers.

NB: behavior changed in Python 3 as StringTypes and basestring are no longer defined. Depending on your needs, you can replace them in isinstance by str, or a subset tuple of (str, bytes, unicode), e.g. for Cython users.
As @Theron Luhn mentionned, you can also use six.

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