3.2 Standard Module types

 

This module defines names for all object types that are used by the standard Python interpreter, but not for the types defined by various extension modules. It is safe to use "from types import *" -- the module does not export any names besides the ones listed here. New names exported by future versions of this module will all end in "Type".

Typical use is for functions that do different things depending on their argument types, like the following:

from types import *
def delete(list, item):
    if type(item) is IntType:
       del list[item]
    else:
       list.remove(item)

The module defines the following names:

NoneType

The type of None.

TypeType

The type of type objects (such as returned by type() ).

IntType

The type of integers (e.g. 1).

LongType

The type of long integers (e.g. 1L).

FloatType

The type of floating point numbers (e.g. 1.0).

StringType

The type of character strings (e.g. 'Spam').

TupleType

The type of tuples (e.g. (1, 2, 3, 'Spam')).

ListType

The type of lists (e.g. [0, 1, 2, 3]).

DictType

The type of dictionaries (e.g. {'Bacon': 1, 'Ham': 0}).

DictionaryType

An alternate name for DictType.

FunctionType

The type of user-defined functions and lambdas.

LambdaType

An alternate name for FunctionType.

CodeType

The type for code objects such as returned by compile() .

ClassType

The type of user-defined classes.

InstanceType

The type of instances of user-defined classes.

MethodType

The type of methods of user-defined class instances.

UnboundMethodType

An alternate name for MethodType.

BuiltinFunctionType

The type of built-in functions like len() or sys.exit().

BuiltinMethodType

An alternate name for BuiltinFunction.

ModuleType

The type of modules.

FileType

The type of open file objects such as sys.stdout.

XRangeType

The type of range objects returned by xrange() .

TracebackType

The type of traceback objects such as found in sys.exc_traceback.

FrameType

The type of frame objects such as found in tb.tb_frame if tb is a traceback object.