How can I check if an object is an iterator in Python?

Question

I can check for a next() method, but is that enough? Is there an ideomatic way?

Answer 1

An object is iterable if it implements the iterator protocol.
You could check the presence of __iter__() method with:

hasattr(object,'__iter__')

in Python 2.x this approach misses str objects and other built-in sequence types like unicode, xrange, buffer. It works in Python 3.

Another way is to test it with iter method :

try:
   iter(object)
except TypeError:
   #not iterable