8.15. 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:

types.NoneType

The type of None.

types.TypeType

The type of type objects (such as returned by type()); alias of the built-in type.

types.BooleanType

The type of the bool values True and False; alias of the built-in bool.

New in version 2.3:

New in version 2.3.

types.IntType

The type of integers (e.g. 1); alias of the built-in int.

types.LongType

The type of long integers (e.g. 1L); alias of the built-in long.

types.FloatType

The type of floating point numbers (e.g. 1.0); alias of the built-in float.

types.ComplexType

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

types.StringType

The type of character strings (e.g. 'Spam'); alias of the built-in str.

types.UnicodeType

The type of Unicode character strings (e.g. u'Spam'). This is not defined if Python was built without Unicode support. It’s an alias of the built-in unicode.

types.TupleType

The type of tuples (e.g. (1, 2, 3, 'Spam')); alias of the built-in tuple.

types.ListType

The type of lists (e.g. [0, 1, 2, 3]); alias of the built-in list.

types.DictType

The type of dictionaries (e.g. {'Bacon': 1, 'Ham': 0}); alias of the built-in dict.

types.DictionaryType

An alternate name for DictType.

types.FunctionType

types.LambdaType

The type of user-defined functions and functions created by lambda expressions.

types.GeneratorType

The type of generator-iterator objects, produced by calling a generator function.

New in version 2.2:

New in version 2.2.