Difference in python between basestring and types.StringType?

Question

What's the difference between:

isinstance(foo, types.StringType)

and

isinstance(foo, basestring)

?

Answer 1

For Python2: basestring is the base class for both str and unicode, while types.StringType is str. If you want to check if something is a string, use basestring. If you want to check if something is a bytestring, use str and forget about types.