I'm trying to count things that are not None, but I want False and numeric zeros to be accepted too. Reversed logic: I want to count everything except what it's been explicitly declared as None.

Example

Just the 5th element it's not included in the count:

>>> list = ['hey', 'what', 0, False, None, 14]
>>> print(magic_count(list))
5

I know this isn't Python normal behavior, but how can I override Python's behavior?

What I've tried

So far I founded people suggesting that a if a is not None else "too bad", but it does not work.

I've also tried isinstance, but with no luck.

Just use sum checking if each object is not None which will be True or False so 1 or 0.

lst = ['hey','what',0,False,None,14]
print(sum(x is not None for x in lst))

Or using filter with python2:

print(len(filter(lambda x: x is not None, lst))) # py3 -> tuple(filter(lambda x: x is not None, lst))

With python3 there is None.__ne__() which will only ignore None's and filter without the need for a lambda.

sum(1 for _ in filter(None.__ne__, lst))

The advantage of sum is it lazily evaluates an element at a time instead of creating a full list of values.

On a side note avoid using list as a variable name as it shadows the python list.