isinstance("my string", "str | int")
isinstance("my string", "list")
Is there a way to check the type of a variable ("my string" in this case) based on a valid type which is stored as a string?
I don't need to import the type, I know it's builtin (int / str / float / etc).
The naive approach would be to call eval(), but that's of course unsafe. Is there a safe way to do this other than using regex/string splitting to extract individual types and matching them to their evaluated types in a huge if/else block?
For built-in types, you can do a lookup in the builtins module:
>>> import builtins
>>> getattr(builtins, 'str')
<class 'str'>
And for classes you've defined in your own code there's the globals() dictionary:
>>> class Foo:
... pass
...
>>> globals()['Foo']
<class '__main__.Foo'>
Note that this doesn't handle union or generic types.