Getting the class name of an instance

Question

How do I find out the name of the class used to create an instance of an object in Python?

I'm not sure if I should use the inspect module or parse the __class__ attribute.

Answer 1

Have you tried the __name__ attribute of the class? ie type(x).__name__ will give you the name of the class, which I think is what you want.

>>> import itertools
>>> x = itertools.count(0)
>>> type(x).__name__
'count'

If you're still using Python 2, note that the above method works with new-style classes only (in Python 3+ all classes are "new-style" classes). Your code might use some old-style classes. The following works for both:

x.__class__.__name__