Python: how can I check whether an object is of type datetime.date?

Question

I have tried a few obvious options but none of them works:

In [150]: x
Out[150]: datetime.date(2012, 9, 1)

In [151]: type(x)
Out[151]: datetime.date

In [15         


        

Answer 1

According to documentation class date is a parent for class datetime. And isinstance() method will give you True in all cases. If you need to distinguish datetime from date you should check name of the class

import datetime

datetime.datetime.now().__class__.__name__ == 'date' #False
datetime.datetime.now().__class__.__name__ == 'datetime' #True
datetime.date.today().__class__.__name__ == 'date' #True
datetime.date.today().__class__.__name__ == 'datetime' #False

I've faced with this problem when i have different formatting rules for dates and dates with time