tolist() should have a consistent output type

As mentioned in #11413, the tolist() method does not always return a list. The naming of tolist() implies that the output will be a list, which can cause issues as in the example below.

If the recursive part of tolist() was rewritten with a helper function, then tolist() could have type-consistent behaviour regardless of the number of dimensions of the input array.

Reproducing code example:

import numpy as np
array_1D_or_2D = np.arange(3)
for x in array_1D_or_2D:
    len(x.tolist())

Error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
TypeError: object of type 'int' has no len()

[yasuiniko]

Yes, it is documented. Thank you. I believe the behaviour itself should be changed. Does this need to be marked as a feature request instead?

[seberg]

Thanks @yasuiniko and Eric, I am going to close the issue. Its a bit of a misnomer, but its tricky/noisy to change a name this and to be honest I would not have a much better name anyway.