[Python] How to allow a function argument to accept either a single object or a list of...

I am currently designing a set of methods to handle stock market data and would like to create a method that gathers price for different assets, however the choice remains to the call the method with one or multiple tickers, in other words what I need to do is:

def getPrice(tickers):
pass


then call it like this

getPrice("AAPL")


or like this

tickers = ["AAPL", "MSFT", "TSLA"]
getPrice(tickers)


I asked Gemini and it recommended the following approach:

def process_data(data):
if not isinstance(data, list):
data = [data] # Convert single element to a list


This surprised me because I thought there might be a more Pythonic way to do this, considering Python's many built-in conveniences. However, I couldn't find a cleaner or more idiomatic solution.

Knowing the answers provided at Handle either a list or single integer as an argument are really close to what Gemini gave me and does not seem Pythonic enough to me as I would like to know if there is an inline solution to pass a list of strings or a single string in the arguments of the method.

Continue reading...