pythonoop

How to check whether a variable is a class or not?

I was wondering how to check whether a variable is a class (not an instance!) or not.

I've tried to use the function isinstance(object, class_or_type_or_tuple) to do this, but I don't know what type a class would have.

For example, in the following code

class Foo:
    pass

isinstance(Foo, **???**) # i want to make this return True.

I tried to substitute "class" with ???, but I realized that class is a keyword in python.

Solution

  • Even better: use the inspect.isclass function.

    >>> import inspect
>>> class X(object):
...     pass
... 
>>> inspect.isclass(X)
True

>>> x = X()
>>> isinstance(x, X)
True
>>> inspect.isclass(x)
False