How to Program Python to check type of variable? | float or int or string or class

In programming, you need to strore value in a variable to use it in your program. In other words, the variable is a place holder for the data.

And data can be of different types like numerical value, string, image, etc.

So before using any variable in Python, you have to declare the variable in your code.

Let’s use this tutorial to learn- how to declare a variable? How to check the data type of each variable in Python?

What is the dynamic data type in Python?

Python follows dynamic data types. This is one of the features of Python programming.

This means we don’t need to specify the datatype of the variable explicitly.

For example, here is Python code for declaring variables of a different type.

Variable declaration in Python:

var = 27 #var is integer variable

var = "computer" #var is string variable

The datatype of the variable is decided based on the type of value assigned to the variable.

Later, I will share two programming methods in Python to check the type of variable.

How to check the data type of the variable?

You can use thetype() inbuilt function.

Pass name of the variable name as input the method type(). It returns the datatype of the variable.

For example:

var = 10
type(var) #<type 'int'>

var = 10.5
type(var) #<type 'float'>

var = "Computer"
type(var) #<type 'str'>

var = [34, 57, 37]
type(var) #<type 'list>

When you assign 10 to the variable, variable become integer type. Here, int and float are the numerical data types in Python.

Why do you need to know the data type of variable?

Every data type has its own significance. There are some supported functions for each data type.

Let’s say, we can not do arithmetic operations on string datatype. Concatenation of two objects is valid only for the string.

Sometimes, you may want to manipulate the data based on its data type. So the comparing data types in Python is essential.

For example:

I am performing ‘+’ operations on integers as well as on strings data type.

strIn1 = "20"
strIn2 = "35"
print('String output: ',strIn1 + strIn2)
val1 = 20
val2 = 35
print('Numeric output: ',val1+val2)

Output:

String output: 2035
Numeric output: 55

In the above program,

• When I perform ‘+’ operations on the strings, it concatenates two string.
• When I perform ‘+’ operations on the integers, it performs an arithmetic addition operation.

So the comparing data types in Python is essential before performing some operations.

Different methods in Python to check the type of variable

Method 1: Using isinstance() function:

The isinstance() function takes two parameters as an input.

If the variable (first parameter) is an instance of data type (mentioned as the second parameter), this function returns true.

For example:

n =16

isinstance(n, int) #True

isinstance(n, long) #False

isinstance(n, str) #False

Here you can also pass the Python tuple as the second argument. Below code checks, if the variable ‘n’ belongs to any of the str, int or float data type.

n =17
isinstance(n, (str, int, float) #True

Here is a simple program that takes input from the user and saves in variable var. Based on the data entered by the user, the data type of the var changes.

If you are taking a number as an input, you can check if the number is int, float or long.

Write a python program to check if a variable is an integer or a string using isinstance()?

var = input("Enter the value: ")

if(isinstance(var, float)):
    print "var is float."
elif(isinstance(var, int)):
    print "var is integer."
elif(isinstance(var,long)):
    print "var is loog."
else
    print "Unknow data type"

Method 2: Using type() function:

We saw earlier identifying the type of the variable using the type() function. You can also use it to check the type of variable using type() method and perform an action based on its type.

Write a python program to check if a variable is an integer or a string using type().

var = input("Enter the value: ")

if type(var).__name__ == 'str':
    print "var is a string!"
elif type(var).__name__ == 'list':
    print "var is a list!"

The above program checks the list and string type. You can use all other data types in the conditional operator.

Python Code to check and identify the class of the object:

You can use the above two methods to identify the object of the particular class.

1) Using type fucntion:

class MyFirstClass:
    var = 10
obj = MyFirstClass()
type(obj) # __main__.MyFirstClass

2)Using isinstance() fucntion:

class MyFirstClass:
    var = 10
obj = MyFirstClass()
isinstance(obj, MyFirstClass) #True

Wrapping up…

Above two methods isinstance() and type()  to identify and check the datatype of the variable, I find very convenient to use in my code.

This is all from this tutorial for python to check the type of variable.  If you have any query or point to discuss, comment below.

Happy Pythoning!