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(         


        

Answer 1

A practical usage difference is how they handle booleans:

True and False are just keywords that mean 1 and 0 in python. Thus,

isinstance(True, int)

and

isinstance(False, int)

both return True. Both booleans are an instance of an integer. type(), however, is more clever:

type(True) == int

returns False.