How to check whether a variable is a class or not?

I was wondering how to check whether a variable is a class (not an instance!) or not.

I've tried to use the function isinstance(object, class_or_type_or_tuple) to do this, but I don't know what type would a class will have.

For example, in the following code

class Foo: pass  
isinstance(Foo, **???**) # i want to make this return True.

I tried to substitute "class" with ???, but I realized that class is a keyword in python.

Solution 1:

Even better: use the inspect.isclass function.

>>> import inspect
>>> class X(object):
...     pass
... 
>>> inspect.isclass(X)
True

>>> x = X()
>>> isinstance(x, X)
True
>>> inspect.isclass(x)
False

Solution 2:

>>> class X(object):
...     pass
... 
>>> type(X)
<type 'type'>
>>> isinstance(X,type)
True

Solution 3:

The inspect.isclass is probably the best solution, and it's really easy to see how it's actually implemented

def isclass(object):
    """Return true if the object is a class.

    Class objects provide these attributes:
        __doc__         documentation string
        __module__      name of module in which this class was defined"""
    return isinstance(object, (type, types.ClassType))