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Type narrowing for a tuple is worse with match than with the equivalent isinstance check #19082
Description
Bug Report
Type narrowing is worse in a match statement on a tuple than the equivalent isinstance check.
With isinstance, mypy is able to determine that the type of a must be the tuple side of the union even though the check is only against Sequence, and then correctly narrows the type of the second element. With match, mypy is unable to do so and gives a union of the two element types in the tuple.
To Reproduce
repro.py
from collections.abc import Sequence
Type = tuple[float, int] | None
def foo(a: int) -> None:
pass
def bar_match(a: Type) -> None:
match a:
case _, int_a:
foo(int_a)
def bar_isinstance(a: Type) -> None:
if isinstance(a, Sequence):
_, int_a = a
foo(int_a)Expected Behavior
No errors
Actual Behavior
$ mypy repro.py repro.py:13: error: Argument 1 to "foo" has incompatible type "float | int"; expected "int" [arg-type] Found 1 error in 1 file (checked 1 source file)
Note that there is only one error, for the bar_match function, and no error for the bar_isinstance function.
Your Environment
I found this with 1.15 and reproduced it on the current master branch.
- Mypy version used: 1.15 or 1.16.0+dev.ca609acabdc94ee973a53d62b8dcb7e55c789aec (compiled: no)
- Mypy command-line flags: None
- Mypy configuration options from mypy.ini (and other config files): None
- Python version used: Python 3.12.3
Possibly related issues:
#19081
Activity
phoebecd commented on May 20, 2025
Hi! When you use isinstance(), it clearly narrows the type of int_a to int, and mypy recognizes this—so it doesn't return a warning. In contrast, match/case is more general, and type checkers like mypy are more conservative with pattern matching. As a result, mypy infers that int_a could be either a float or an int, and returns a type error.
Also, when I first ran your code, I didn't get a warning. I had to use mypy --strict repro.py to make the warning appear. Afterwards, I disabled strict mode by just running mypy repro.py, so those optional error checks were not enabled, and I didn’t receive the error again.
Jonas-Puksta-Sensmetry commented on Jun 26, 2025
I have bumped into the exact same issue, but in my case --strict flag is not needed to reproduce the problem.
From the code
Mypy produces error
main.py:4: error: Unsupported operand types for + ("str" and "int") [operator] main.py:4: note: Left operand is of type "str | int"(see https://mypy-play.net/?mypy=1.16.1&python=3.12&gist=920b90a2a8f48889b759b77935502820)
Jonas-Puksta-Sensmetry commented on Jun 26, 2025
A workaround is to replace <tupple-pattern> with tuple(<tupple-pattern>), like below
Mypy produces no errors for this code.
saulshanabrook commented on Aug 9, 2025
I just opened #19600 to fix this bug
Fix matching against union of tuples (python#19600)