What's the canonical way to check for type in Python?

Question

What is the best way to check whether a given object is of a given type? How about checking whether the object inherits from a given type?

Let\'s say I have an objec

Answer 1

You can check for type of a variable using __name__ of a type.

Ex:

>>> a = [1,2,3,4]  
>>> b = 1  
>>> type(a).__name__
'list'
>>> type(a).__name__ == 'list'
True
>>> type(b).__name__ == 'list'
False
>>> type(b).__name__
'int'