How do I compare version numbers in Python?

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Use packaging.version.parse.

>>> from packaging import version
>>> version.parse("2.3.1") < version.parse("10.1.2")
True
>>> version.parse("1.3.a4") < version.parse("10.1.2")
True
>>> isinstance(version.parse("1.3.a4"), version.Version)
True
>>> isinstance(version.parse("1.3.xy123"), version.LegacyVersion)
True
>>> version.Version("1.3.xy123")
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
packaging.version.InvalidVersion: Invalid version: '1.3.xy123'

packaging.version.parse is a third-party utility but is used by setuptools (so you probably already have it installed) and is conformant to the current PEP 440; it will return a packaging.version.Version if the version is compliant and a packaging.version.LegacyVersion if not. The latter will always sort before valid versions.

Note: packaging has recently been vendored into setuptools.

An ancient and now deprecated method you might encounter is distutils.version, it’s undocumented and conforms only to the superseded PEP 386;

>>> from distutils.version import LooseVersion, StrictVersion
>>> LooseVersion("2.3.1") < LooseVersion("10.1.2")
True
>>> StrictVersion("2.3.1") < StrictVersion("10.1.2")
True
>>> StrictVersion("1.3.a4")
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: invalid version number '1.3.a4'

As you can see it sees valid PEP 440 versions as “not strict” and therefore doesn’t match modern Python’s notion of what a valid version is.

As distutils.version is undocumented, here are the relevant docstrings.

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