Comparing boolean and int using isinstance

Question

Can someone give me an explanation why isinstance() returns True in the following case? I expected False, when writing the code.

print isinstance(True, (float, int))
True

My guess would be that its Python's internal subclassing, as zero and one - whether float or int - both evaluate when used as boolean, but don't know the exact reason.

What would be the most pythonic way to solve such a situation? I could use type() but in most cases this is considered less pythonic.

Answer 1

For historic reasons, bool is a subclass of int, so True is an instance of int. (Originally, Python had no bool type, and things that returned truth values returned 1 or 0. When they added bool, True and False had to be drop-in replacements for 1 and 0 as much as possible for backward compatibility, hence the subclassing.)

The correct way to "solve" this depends on exactly what you consider the problem to be.

• If you want True to stop being an int, well, too bad. That's not going to happen.

• If you want to detect booleans and handle them differently from other ints, you can do that:

  if isinstance(whatever, bool):
      # special handling
  elif isinstance(whatever, (float, int)):
      # other handling
  

• If you want to detect objects whose specific class is exactly float or int, rejecting subclasses, you can do that:

  if type(whatever) in (float, int):
      # Do stuff.
  

• If you want to detect all floats and ints, you're already doing that.

Answer 2

Yes, this is right, it's a subclass of int, you can verify it using the interpreter:

>>> int.__subclasses__()
[<type 'bool'>]

Answer 3

If you only want to check for int:

if type(some_var) is int:
    return True

else:
    return False

Answer 4

See some behaviors (Not so wierd) of python on bool and int

>>> 1 == True  
True           
>>> 0 == False 
True           
>>> True*5 == 0
False          
>>> True*5 == 5
True           
>>> 

How interchangeable can they be used...!

From boolobject.h (win py 2.7) I can see a typedef of int for bool obj. So it is pretty evident that bool has inherited few facial features of int.

#ifndef Py_BOOLOBJECT_H
#define Py_BOOLOBJECT_H
#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif


typedef PyIntObject PyBoolObject;