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pythonironpythonversiondetection

Best way to detect IronPython

I need to write a module which will be used from both CPython and IronPython. What's the best way to detect IronPython, since I need a slightly different behaviour in that case?

I noticed that sys.platform is "win32" on CPython, but "cli" on IronPython.

Is there another preferred/standard way of detecting it?

Solution

  • New in Python 2.6 is platform.python_implementation:

    Returns a string identifying the Python implementation. Possible return values are: ‘CPython’, ‘IronPython’, ‘Jython’.

    That's probably the cleanest way to do it, and that's about as standard as it gets. However, I believe Jython is still running 2.5, so I'm not sure you can rely on this to detect Jython just yet (but that wasn't part of your question anyway).