How to accept both filenames and file-like objects in Python functions?

One way of having either a file name or a file-like object as argument is the implementation of a context manager that can handle both. An implementation can be found here, I quote for the sake of a self contained answer:

class open_filename(object):
"""Context manager that opens a filename and closes it on exit, but does
nothing for file-like objects.
"""
def __init__(self, filename, *args, **kwargs):
    self.closing = kwargs.pop('closing', False)
    if isinstance(filename, basestring):
        self.fh = open(filename, *args, **kwargs)
        self.closing = True
    else:
        self.fh = filename

def __enter__(self):
    return self.fh

def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
    if self.closing:
        self.fh.close()

    return False

Possible usage then:

def load_dataset(file_):
    with open_filename(file_, "r") as f:
        # process here, read only if the file_ is a string

Don't accept both files and strings. If you're going to accept file-like objects, then it means you won't check the type, just call the required methods on the actual parameter (read, write, etc.). If you're going to accept strings, then you're going to end up open-ing files, which means you won't be able to mock the parameters. So I'd say accept files, let the caller pass you a file-like object, and don't check the type.

I'm using a context manager wrapper. When it's a filename (str), close the file on exit.

@contextmanager
def fopen(filein, *args, **kwargs):
    if isinstance(filein, str):  # filename
        with open(filein, *args, **kwargs) as f:
            yield f
    else:  # file-like object
        yield filein

Then you can use it like:

with fopen(filename_or_fileobj) as f:
    # do sth. with f

Python follows duck typing, you may check that this is file object by function that you need from object. For example hasattr(obj, 'read') against isinstance(inputelement, file). For converting string to file objects you may also use such construction:

if not hasattr(obj, 'read'):
    obj = StringIO(str(obj))

After this code you will safely be able to use obj as a file.