Converting from a string to boolean in Python?

Does anyone know how to do convert from a string to a boolean in Python? I found this link. But it doesn't look like a proper way to do it. I.e. using built-in functionality, etc.

The reason I'm asking this is because I learned about int("string") from here. But when trying bool("string") it always returns True:

>>> bool("False")
True

Solution 1:

Really, you just compare the string to whatever you expect to accept as representing true, so you can do this:

s == 'True'

Or to checks against a whole bunch of values:

s.lower() in ['true', '1', 't', 'y', 'yes', 'yeah', 'yup', 'certainly', 'uh-huh']

Be cautious when using the following:

>>> bool("foo")
True
>>> bool("")
False

Empty strings evaluate to False, but everything else evaluates to True. So this should not be used for any kind of parsing purposes.

Solution 2:

Use:

bool(distutils.util.strtobool(some_string))

• Python 2: http://docs.python.org/2/distutils/apiref.html?highlight=distutils.util#distutils.util.strtobool
• Python 3: https://docs.python.org/3/distutils/apiref.html#distutils.util.strtobool

True values are y, yes, t, true, on and 1; false values are n, no, f, false, off and 0. Raises ValueError if val is anything else.

Be aware that distutils.util.strtobool() returns integer representations and thus it needs to be wrapped with bool() to get Boolean values.

Solution 3:

def str2bool(v):
  return v.lower() in ("yes", "true", "t", "1")

Then call it like so:

>>> str2bool("yes")
True
>>> str2bool("no")
False
>>> str2bool("stuff")
False
>>> str2bool("1")
True
>>> str2bool("0")
False

Handling true and false explicitly:

You could also make your function explicitly check against a True list of words and a False list of words. Then if it is in neither list, you could throw an exception.