What are the differences between type() and isinstance()?

Question

What are the differences between these two code fragments?Using `type()`: import types if type(a) is types.DictType: do_something() if type(b) in types.StringTypes: do_something_else()Using `isinstance()`: if isinstance(a, dict): do_something() if isinstance(b, str) or isinstance(b, unicode): do_something_else()

Answer 1

The code snippets you showed achieve the same result; type() returns the type object of it's (only) argument, so

type('some string') => <class str>

whereas isinstance takes two arguments, an object and a type, and returns a boolean indicating whether is of the given type, so

isinstance('some string', str) => True