How to check if an object is an instance of a namedtuple?

Calling the function collections.namedtuple gives you a new type that's a subclass of tuple (and no other classes) with a member named _fields that's a tuple whose items are all strings. So you could check for each and every one of these things:

def isnamedtupleinstance(x):
    t = type(x)
    b = t.__bases__
    if len(b) != 1 or b[0] != tuple: return False
    f = getattr(t, '_fields', None)
    if not isinstance(f, tuple): return False
    return all(type(n)==str for n in f)

it IS possible to get a false positive from this, but only if somebody's going out of their way to make a type that looks a lot like a named tuple but isn't one;-).

3.7+

def isinstance_namedtuple(obj) -> bool:
    return (
            isinstance(obj, tuple) and
            hasattr(obj, '_asdict') and
            hasattr(obj, '_fields')
    )

If you need to check before calling namedtuple specific functions on it, then just call them and catch the exception instead. That's the preferred way to do it in python.

IMO this might be the best solution for Python 3.6 and later.

You can set a custom __module__ when you instantiate your namedtuple, and check for it later

from collections import namedtuple

# module parameter added in python 3.6
namespace = namedtuple("namespace", "foo bar", module=__name__ + ".namespace")

then check for __module__

if getattr(x, "__module__", None) == "xxxx.namespace":