could prob do if key.isnumeric()

Part will also be a str though? So I would have to cast it to make it work I think.

isnumeric is a string method to tell you if all the characters are digits. so you could do

if part.isnumeric():
    key = int(part)
else:
    key = part

I just like to avoid extraneous try/catches where possible. maybe that's silly

Ah that makes sense. I can do that.

wait isdigit does the same thing. Why did we change this from the prev implementation?

This is because both isdigit and (I just realized) isnumeric don't handle decimals or negative numbers. I'll stick with the current implementation for now.