title: What's the pythonic way to distinguish between a dict and a list of dicts?
body: <p>So, I'm trying to be a good Python programmer and duck-type wherever I can, but I've got a bit of a problem where my input is either a <code>dict</code> or a <code>list</code> of <code>dict</code>s.</p>
  
  <p>I can't distinguish between them being iterable, because they both are.</p>
  
  <p>My next thought was simply to call <code>list(x)</code> and hope that returned my list intact and gave me my dict as the only item in a list; alas, it just gives me the list of the dict's keys.</p>
  
  <p>I'm now officially out of ideas (short of calling <code>isinstance</code> which is, as we all know, not very pythonic). I just want to end up with a list of dicts, even if my input is a single solitary dict.</p>