How to check if an object is an instance of a namedtuple?

Question

How do I check if an object is an instance of a Named tuple?

Answer 1

Calling the function collections.namedtuple gives you a new type that's a subclass of tuple (and no other classes) with a member named _fields that's a tuple whose items are all strings. So you could check for each and every one of these things:

def isnamedtupleinstance(x):
    t = type(x)
    b = t.__bases__
    if len(b) != 1 or b[0] != tuple: return False
    f = getattr(t, '_fields', None)
    if not isinstance(f, tuple): return False
    return all(type(n)==str for n in f)

it IS possible to get a false positive from this, but only if somebody's going out of their way to make a type that looks a lot like a named tuple but isn't one;-).

Answer 2

I realize this is old, but I found this useful:

from collections import namedtuple

SomeThing = namedtuple('SomeThing', 'prop another_prop')
SomeOtherThing = namedtuple('SomeOtherThing', 'prop still_another_prop')

a = SomeThing(1, 2)

isinstance(a, SomeThing) # True
isinstance(a, SomeOtherThing) # False

Answer 3

If you need to check before calling namedtuple specific functions on it, then just call them and catch the exception instead. That's the preferred way to do it in python.

Answer 4

Improving on what Lutz posted:

def isinstance_namedtuple(x):                                                               
  return (isinstance(x, tuple) and                                                  
          isinstance(getattr(x, '__dict__', None), collections.Mapping) and         
          getattr(x, '_fields', None) is not None)                                  

Answer 5

I use

isinstance(x, tuple) and isinstance(x.__dict__, collections.abc.Mapping)

which to me appears to best reflect the dictionary aspect of the nature of named tuples. It appears robust against some conceivable future changes too and might also work with many third-party namedtuple-ish classes, if such things happen to exist.