[FIXED] Conditional isn't working while checking input type int

Issue

Well I'm very very new to python programming and still learning.So I tried to create a function where I used len to count the number of letters in a string.But since, len doesn't work for integers I set up conditionals so that it would return a message saying "integers don't have length". But I'm not getting the message even when I type an integer. please help me to solve this. here is my code:

def Length_String(L):
    if type(L) == int:
        return "sorry,integers don't have length"
    else:
        return len(L)
x = input()
y = Length_String(x)
print(y)

It's not that important but still I want to know what is causing the conditional not to work. please help me.

Solution

Note you can always type help(whatever) in a Python prompt to read some useful stuff about it:

input(...)

input([prompt]) -> string

Read a string from standard input.  The trailing newline is stripped.
If the user hits EOF (Unix: Ctl-D, Windows: Ctl-Z+Return), raise EOFError.
On Unix, GNU readline is used if enabled.  The prompt string, if given,
is printed without a trailing newline before reading.

So you always get a string. One way to see if this string could be converted to an integer is:

try:
     int(L)
     return "Error, this is an integer!"
except ValueError:
    return len(L)

Of course, this won't work for floats, so there maybe more checks you want to do (or just use float(L)). Another way

if L.isnumeric(): # or isdigit or isdecimal
    return "Error, this is a number!"
return L

Here it's worth mention that in addition to the help which can show methods you can always type dir(something) in a Python prompt so see some useful methods in a list.

Answered By - kabanus