[Tutor] isinstance versus 'is'?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 03:05:45PM -0400, Alex Hall wrote:

> >>> a = 5
> >>> isinstance(a, int)
> True
> >>> a is int
> False
> 
> What happened there? Don't these do the same thing? I thought I could use
> them interchangeably?

You're probably thinking of "is a", as in, "5 is an int", "'Hello 
World' is a str", "[1, 2, 3] is a list", etc.

Python doesn't have an operator for testing "is a" relationships, it 
uses isinstance(obj, type). There's also issubclass(), for testing 
whether one class is a subclass of another.

"x is y" checks whether the two operands x and y are the same object. 
That's *not* the same as checking whether they are equal. You should 
hardly ever use "is" in Python, with the exception of testing for None: 
"if obj is None: ..." sort of thing.


-- 
Steve