python - AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'lock'

Question

As part of my unit testing procedure i'm evaluating the type of a variable which has been returned from a certain method. The method returns a variable of type 'thread.lock' and I would like to test for this in the same way I test for variables of type 'str' or 'int' etc

This is the example carried out in the python 2.7.6 shell

>>> import threading, thread
>>> mylock = threading.Lock()
>>> type(mylock)
<type 'thread.lock'>
>>> type(mylock) is thread.lock

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#3>", line 1, in <module>
    type(mylock) is thread.lock
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'lock'

I expected it to return True as shown in the second example

>>> myint = 4
>>> type(myint)
<type 'int'>
>>> type(myint) is int
True
>>> 

Please any solutions on how to get around this will be highly appreciated. Thanks

Solution

Instead of thread.lock use thread.LockType:

>>> import threading, thread
>>> mylock = threading.Lock()
>>> type(mylock)
<type 'thread.lock'>
>>> thread.LockType
<type 'thread.lock'>
>>> type(mylock) is thread.LockType
True

But it is preferable to use isinstance():

>>> isinstance(mylock, thread.LockType)
True

Comments

[BeeLabeille]

Thanks a lot Hugo Sousa. This solution works as well but I'll pick the answer given by @mhawke because yours came second. Cheers!

[Diogo]

Low-level thread API on Python 3.X is called _thread. So you can do import _thread and check type( _thread.LockType ) instead.