Python Print Type of Variable – How to Get Var Type (2024)

If you're a Python beginner, becoming familiar with all its various data types can be confusing at first. After all, there are a lot of them available to you in the language.

In this article, I'm going to show you how to get the type of various data structures in Python by assigning them to a variable, and then printing the type to the console with the print() function.

How to Print the Type of a Variable in Python

To get the type of a variable in Python, you can use the built-in type() function.

The basic syntax looks like this:

type(variableName)

In Python, everything is an object. So, when you use the type() function to print the type of the value stored in a variable to the console, it returns the class type of the object.

For instance, if the type is a string and you use the type() on it, you'd get <class ‘string‘> as the result.

To show you the type() function in action, I'm going to declare some variables and assign to them the various data types in Python.

name = "freeCodeCamp"score = 99.99lessons = ["RWD", "JavaScript", "Databases", "Python"]person = { "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Doe", "age": 28}langs = ("Python", "JavaScript", "Golang")basics = {"HTML", "CSS", "JavaScript"}

I will then print the types to the console by wrapping print() around some strings and the type() function.

print("The variable, name is of type:", type(name))print("The variable, score is of type:", type(score))print("The variable, lessons is of type:", type(lessons))print("The variable, person is of type:", type(person))print("The variable, langs is of type:", type(langs))print("The variable, basics is of type:", type(basics))

Here are the outputs:

# Outputs:# The variable, name is of type: <class 'str'># The variable, score is of type: <class 'float'> # The variable, lessons is of type: <class 'list'># The variable, person is of type: <class 'dict'> # The variable, langs is of type: <class 'tuple'> # The variable, basics is of type: <class 'set'>

Final Thoughts

The type() function is a valuable built-in function of Python with which you can get the data type of a variable.

If you're a beginner, you should save yourself the hassle of cramming data types by using the type() function to print the type of a variable to the console. This will save you some time.

You can also use the type() function for debugging because in Python, variables are not declared with data types. So, the type() function was built into the language for you to check for data types of variables.

Thank you for reading.