Question

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.

Answer 1

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