5.15 types -- Names for built-in types

This module defines names for some object types that are used by the standard Python interpreter, but not for the types defined by various extension modules. Also, it does not include some of the types that arise during processing such as the listiterator type. 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(mylist, item):
    if type(item) is IntType:
       del mylist[item]
    else:
       mylist.remove(item)

Starting in Python 2.2, built-in factory functions such as int() and str() are also names for the corresponding types. This is now the preferred way to access the type instead of using the types module. Accordingly, the example above should be written as follows:

def delete(mylist, item):
    if isinstance(item, int):
       del mylist[item]
    else:
       mylist.remove(item)

The module defines the following names:

NoneType
The type of None.

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

BooleanType
The type of the bool values True and False; this is an alias of the built-in bool() function. New in version 2.3.

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).

ComplexType
The type of complex numbers (e.g. 1.0j). This is not defined if Python was built without complex number support.

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

UnicodeType
The type of Unicode character strings (e.g. u'Spam'). This is not defined if Python was built without Unicode support.

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.

GeneratorType
The type of generator-iterator objects, produced by calling a generator function. New in version 2.2.

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().

SliceType
The type of objects returned by slice().

EllipsisType
The type of Ellipsis.

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.

BufferType
The type of buffer objects created by the buffer() function.

DictProxyType
The type of dict proxies, such as TypeType.__dict__.

NotImplementedType
The type of NotImplemented

GetSetDescriptorType
The type of objects defined in extension modules with PyGetSetDef, such as FrameType.f_locals or array.array.typecode. This constant is not defined in implementations of Python that do not have such extension types, so for portable code use hasattr(types, 'GetSetDescriptorType'). New in version 2.5.

MemberDescriptorType
The type of objects defined in extension modules with PyMemberDef, such as datetime.timedelta.days. This constant is not defined in implementations of Python that do not have such extension types, so for portable code use hasattr(types, 'MemberDescriptorType'). New in version 2.5.

StringTypes
A sequence containing StringType and UnicodeType used to facilitate easier checking for any string object. Using this is more portable than using a sequence of the two string types constructed elsewhere since it only contains UnicodeType if it has been built in the running version of Python. For example: isinstance(s, types.StringTypes). New in version 2.2.
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