Since Enum Type implements IConvertible interface, a better implementation should be something like this:
public T GetEnumFromString<T>(string value) where T : struct, IConvertible
{
if (!typeof(T).IsEnum)
{
throw new ArgumentException("T must be an enumerated type");
}
//...
}
This will still permit passing of value types implementing IConvertible. The chances are rare though.
To check if o is an instance of str or any subclass of str, use isinstance (this would be the "canonical" way):
if isinstance(o, str):
To check if the type of o is exactly str (exclude subclasses):
if type(o) is str:
The following also works, and can be useful in some cases:
if issubclass(type(o), str):
See Built-in Functions in the Python Library Reference for relevant information.
One more note: in this case, if you're using Python 2, you may actually want to use:
if isinstance(o, basestring):
because this will also catch Unicode strings (unicode is not a subclass of str; both str and unicode are subclasses of basestring). Note that basestring no longer exists in Python 3, where there's a strict separation of strings (str) and binary data (bytes).
Alternatively, isinstance accepts a tuple of classes. This will return True if o is an instance of any subclass of any of (str, unicode):
if isinstance(o, (str, unicode)):
Best Solution
Unfortunately this is not possible (see here.) You can only constrain the type to:
classorstructConstraining types to have specific operators is a much-requested feature but I believe it will not be in C# 4 either.