any() with sequence of strings

Question

Why does

any(['','foo'])

raise the exception

TypeError: cannot perform reduce with flexible type

I thought it should evaluate to True, because

• bool('') evaluates to False
• bool('foo') evaluates to True
• I though any() could be used with any sequence of objects that are convertible to bool

I'm using Python 2.7.

Answer 1

You are accidentally calling numpy.any() instead of the built-in any(). The latter does work for your example.

To fix this, you need to sort out the imports. Look for from numpy import * and from numpy import any, and for similar imports involving scipy and pylab.