How to check if type of a variable is string

Question

Is there a way to check if the type of a variable in python is a string  like   isinstance x int     for integer values

User · Answer

In Python 2 x  you would do  isinstance s  basestring    basestring is the abstract superclass of str and unicode  It can be used to test whether an object is an instance of str or unicode     In Python 3 x  the correct test is  isinstance s  str    The bytes class isn t considered a string type in Python 3

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The type module also exists if you are checking more than ints and strings   http   docs python org library types html

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Also I want notice that if you want to check whether the type of a variable is a specific kind  you can compare the type of the variable to the type of a known object   For string you can use this  type s     type

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In Python 3 x or Python 2 7 6  if type x     str

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Edit based on better answer below   Go down about 3 answers and find out about the coolness of basestring   Old answer  Watch out for unicode strings  which you can get from several places  including all COM calls in Windows   if isinstance target  str  or isinstance target  unicode

User · Answer

If you do not want to depend on external libs  this works both for Python 2 7  and Python 3  http   ideone com uB4Kdc      your code goes here s     test     s    test   isString   False   if isinstance s  str        isString   True  try      if isinstance s  basestring            isString   True  except NameError      pass   if isString       print  String    else      print  Not String

User · Answer

you can do   var   1 if type var     int     print  your variable is an integer     or   var2    this is variable  2  if type var2     str      print  your variable is a string   else      print  your variable IS NOT a string     hope this helps

User · Answer

s    123  issubclass s   class    str

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I ve seen    hasattr s   endswith

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This is how I do it   if type x     type str

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Alternative way for Python 2  without using basestring   isinstance s   str  unicode     But still won t work in Python 3 since unicode isn t defined  in Python 3

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gt  gt  gt  thing    foo   gt  gt  gt  type thing    name       str  or type thing    name       unicode  True

User · Answer

So   You have plenty of options to check whether your variable is string or not   a    my string  type a     str   first  a   class      str   second isinstance a  str    third str a     a   forth type a     type       fifth   This order is for purpose

User · Answer

You can simply use the isinstance function to make sure that the input data is of format string or unicode  Below examples will help you to understand easily    gt  gt  gt  isinstance  my string   str  True  gt  gt  gt  isinstance 12  str  False  gt  gt  gt  isinstance  my string   unicode  False  gt  gt  gt  isinstance u my string    unicode  True

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a    1000    also tested for  abc100    a100bc    100abc   isinstance a  str  or isinstance a  unicode    returns True  type a  in  str  unicode    returns True

User · Answer

Lots of good suggestions provided by others here  but I don t see a good cross-platform summary   The following should be a good drop in for any Python program   def isstring s         if we use Python 3     if  sys version info 0   gt   3           return isinstance s  str        we use Python 2     return isinstance s  basestring    In this function  we use isinstance object  classinfo  to see if our input is a str in Python 3 or a basestring in Python 2

User · Answer

I know this is an old topic  but being the first one shown on google and given that I don t find any of the answers satisfactory  I ll leave this here for future reference   six is a Python 2 and 3 compatibility library which already covers this issue  You can then do something like this   import six  if isinstance value  six string types       pass   It s a string      Inspecting the code  this is what you find   import sys  PY3   sys version info 0     3  if PY3      string types   str  else      string types   basestring

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Here is my answer to support both Python 2 and Python 3 along with these requirements    Written in Py3 code with minimal Py2 compat code  Remove Py2 compat code later without disruption  I e  aim for deletion only  no modification to Py3 code  Avoid using six or similar compat module as they tend to hide away what is trying to be achieved  Future-proof for a potential Py4      import sys PY2   sys version info major    2    Check if string  lenient for byte-strings on Py2   isinstance  abc   basestring if PY2 else str     Check if strictly a string  unicode-string   isinstance  abc   unicode if PY2 else str     Check if either string  unicode-string  or byte-string  isinstance  abc   basestring if PY2 else  str  bytes      Check for byte-string  Py3 and Py2 7   isinstance  abc   bytes

User · Answer

since basestring isn t defined in Python3  this little trick might help to make the code compatible   try    check whether python knows about  basestring     basestring except NameError    no  it doesn t  it s Python3   use  str  instead    basestring str   after that you can run the following test on both Python2 and Python3  isinstance myvar  basestring

User · Answer

Python 2   3 including unicode  from   future   import unicode literals from builtins import str     pip install future isinstance  asdf   str       True isinstance u asdf   str      True   http   python-future org overview html

[python] How to check if type of a variable is string?

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