Used to find out if one something is an instance of another, lets look at an example:
class Animal(object): name=None def speak(self): print'My name is ', self.name def walk(self): print "I don’t know how to walk" def breath(self): print "I don’t know how to breath" class Dog(Animal): def speak(self): print'Woof!!' fido = Dog() print isinstance(fido, Animal)
Output: True
This outputs True because ‘fido’ is an instance of the ‘Dog()’ class, which inherits from the ‘Animal()’ class (class Dog(Animal))