Python is one of the few (?) languages where ' and " have identical functionality. The choice for me usually depends on what is inside. If I'm going to quote a string that has single quotes within it I'll use double quotes and visa versa, to cut down on having to escape characters in the string.

Examples:

"this doesn't require escaping the single quote"
'she said "quoting is easy in python"'

This is documented on the "String Literals" page of the python documentation:

• http://docs.python.org/2/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-literals (2.x)
• http://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals (3.x)

I know this is an old topic, but being the first one shown on google and given that I don't find any of the answers satisfactory, I'll leave this here for future reference:

six is a Python 2 and 3 compatibility library which already covers this issue. You can then do something like this:

import six

if isinstance(value, six.string_types):
    pass # It's a string !!

Inspecting the code, this is what you find:

import sys

PY3 = sys.version_info[0] == 3

if PY3:
    string_types = str,
else:
    string_types = basestring,