Comparisons in Python: the difference between “is” and “==”
3 min readJan 19, 2020
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Comparing one thing to another is constant in programming. But Python has two ways to do this: ==
and is
. So what’s the difference, anyway?
Let’s give ourselves a class to work with as we see how this all works. A cat, obviously.
class Cat():
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name def __eq__(self, other):
return self.name == other.name
You’ll notice we’ve defined an __eq__
method on our Cat
class: this lets us give a…