Check if a variable is SRE_Match

Question

I need to check if a variable is a regular expression match object.

print(type(m)) returns something like that: <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x000

Answer 1

You can do

SRE_MATCH_TYPE = type(re.match("", ""))

at the start of the program, and then

type(m) is SRE_MATCH_TYPE

each time you want to make the comparison.

Answer 2

Pile-on, since there's a whole bunch of ways to solve the problem:

def is_match_obj(m):
    t = type(m)
    return (t.__module__, t.__name__) == ('_sre', 'SRE_Match')

Answer 3

You can do something like this

isinstance(m, type(re.match("","")))

Usually there is no need to check the type of match objects, so noone has bothered to make a nice way to do it

Answer 4

from typing import Match

isinstance(m, Match)

Answer 5

As type(m) returns a printable representation I would use:

repr(type(m)) == "<type '_sre.SRE_Match'>"

so you don't have to import the _sre module and don't have to do any additional match call.

That is for Python 2. It seems than in Python 3 the result of type(m) is different, something like <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x000000000345BE68>. If so I suppose you can use:

repr(type(m)).startswith("<_sre.SRE_Match")

or something similar (I don't have a Python 3 interpreter at hand right now, so this part of the answer can be inaccurate.).