I am looking at methods for detecting the type of a variable (list vs string) within python (2.5+), and came across some other answers which seemed overly convoluted.
I have found one can do
x.__class__.__name__
to get a string containing the class name. What, if anything, is wrong with this? Is it not portable? When would it fail?
The problem is that different classes can have the same name.
The straightforward example is for classes defined in different modules (e.g. think of generic common names such as Node or Connection).
However, it's easy to demonstrate this problem even in a single module:
class A(object): pass
B = A
class A(object): pass
C = A
b = B()
c = C()
b.__class__.__name__ == c.__class__.__name__
=> True
type(b) == type(c)
=> False
If you don't have to have string-representation of the class, simply use the type object returned by calling type(obj).
Of course, depending on what you use it for, it might be best to use isinstance instead of dealing with type objects directly.