determine if a list contains other lists
<p>if I have a list, is there any way to check if it contains any other lists?</p>

<p>what i mean to say is, I want to know if a list has this strcuture: <code>[]</code> as opposed to this structure <code>[[]]</code></p>

<p>so, compare [1,2,3,4] to [1,[2,3],4]</p>

<p>this is complicated by the fact that i have a list of strings.</p>

<p>well, phihag's solution seems to be working so far, but what I'm doing is this:</p>

<pre><code>uniqueCrossTabs = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(uniqueCrossTabs))
</code></pre>

<p>in order to flatten a list if it has other lists in it.
But since my list contains strings, if this is done on an already flattened list, I get a list of each character of each string that was in the original list.
This is not the behavior i was looking for. so, checking to see if the list needs to be flattened before flattening is neccessary.</p>
