Texas A&M University (TAMU) ENGR102 Engineering Lab I - Computation Practice Exam

The function used to check the type of a variable in Python is the type() function. This built-in function takes a single argument and returns the type of that argument, which is extremely useful for debugging and ensuring that the correct data types are being used in your code.

When you use type(variable_name), it will provide you with a specific type object that indicates what kind of variable you are working with, such as int, str, list, etc. This can help prevent type-related errors in your program by allowing you to enforce specific data types where necessary or simply to understand what type of data you are dealing with at any point in your code.

Other functions, such as isinstance(), check if an object is an instance or subclass of a class or a tuple of classes, but they do so in a different way than simply returning the type itself. The len() function returns the number of items in an object, and check_type() is not a standard Python function. Therefore, type() is the most direct and appropriate way to determine the type of a variable.