InstanceType tests in Python-3.0

Carl Banks pavlovevidence at gmail.com
Thu Feb 14 17:58:07 EST 2008


On Feb 14, 10:26 am, Robin Becker <ro... at reportlab.com> wrote:
> I'm in the process of porting some code. I have 2.x code that looks like this
>
> t = type(e)
> if t==InstanceType:
>     return f0(e)
> elif t in (float,int):
>     return f1(e)
> else:
>     return str(e)
>
> In python 3.0 everything has been unified and people say use attributes to tell
> what should be done in such a branch. However, this is the real world and this
> code is fairly complex. Originally we had a distinction between user defined
> class instances and those of the builtins like float, int, str etc etc. Is there
> any way for me to tell if an object is an instance of a used defined class which
> can then be tested further perhaps?


Here's something that'll work kind of sometimes.


def is_probably_user_defined_class(cls):
    try:
        modname = cls.__module__
    except AttributeError:
        return False
    try:
        mod = sys.modules[modname]
    except KeyError:
        return False
    try:
        filename = mod.__file__
    except AttributeError:
        return False
    return filename.endswith('.pyc')


Carl Banks



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