Check if a variable is a string or not in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to check if a variable is a string in Python with the help of examples.

Consider, that we have the following variable in our code:

name = "olive"

Now, we need to check whether the above variable is a string or not.

Using type() function

To check if a variable is a string or not, we can use the built-in type() function in Python.

The type() function takes the variable as an argument and returns the type of the following object.

Here is an example:

name = "olive"

if type(name) == str:
    print('Variable is a string')
else:
    print('Variable is not a string')

Output:

'Variable is a string'

In the above code,

1. We have first initialized the variable with a string.

2. Then we used the equality == operator to check if both values refer to the same object.

If it returns True then it prints the variable is a string, if the variable is not a string then it returns False and prints Variable is not a string.

Another example:

age = 23

if type(age) == str:
    print('Variable is string')
else:
    print('Variable is not a string')

Output:

'Variable is not a string'

Instead of equality operator, we can also use the is operator like this.

age = 23

if type(age) is str:
    print('Variable is string')
else:
    print('Variable is not a string')

Using isinstance() function

Alternatively, we can also use the isinstance() function in Python to check if a given variable is a string.

The isinstance() function takes the two arguments, the first argument is object, and the second argument is type then It returns True if a given object is a specified type otherwise it returns False.

name = "olive"

if  isinstance(name, str):
    print('Variable is a string')
else:
    print('Variable is not a string')