Detect if a variable is a datetime object

Question

I have a variable and I need to know if it is a datetime object.

So far I have been using the following hack in the function to detect datetime object:

if 'datetime.datetime' in str(type(variable)):      print('yes') 

But there really should be a way to detect what type of object something is. Just like I can do:

if type(variable) is str: print 'yes' 

Is there a way to do this other than the hack of turning the name of the object type into a string and seeing if the string contains 'datetime.datetime'?

Answer 1

You need isinstance(variable, datetime.datetime):

>>> import datetime >>> now = datetime.datetime.now() >>> isinstance(now, datetime.datetime) True 

Update

As noticed by Davos, datetime.datetime is a subclass of datetime.date, which means that the following would also work:

>>> isinstance(now, datetime.date) True 

Perhaps the best approach would be just testing the type (as suggested by Davos):

>>> type(now) is datetime.date False >>> type(now) is datetime.datetime True 

Pandas Timestamp

One comment mentioned that in python3.7, that the original solution in this answer returns False (it works fine in python3.4). In that case, following Davos's comments, you could do following:

>>> type(now) is pandas.Timestamp 

If you wanted to check whether an item was of type datetime.datetime OR pandas.Timestamp, just check for both

>>> (type(now) is datetime.datetime) or (type(now) is pandas.Timestamp)