Dynamically import a method in a file, from a string

Question

I have a string, say: abc.def.ghi.jkl.myfile.mymethod. How do I dynamically import mymethod?

Here is how I went about it:

def get_method_from_file(full_path):     if len(full_path) == 1:         return map(__import__,[full_path[0]])[0]     return getattr(get_method_from_file(full_path[:-1]),full_path[-1])   if __name__=='__main__':     print get_method_from_file('abc.def.ghi.jkl.myfile.mymethod'.split('.')) 

I am wondering if the importing individual modules is required at all.

Edit: I am using Python version 2.6.5.

Answer 1

From Python 2.7 you can use the importlib.import_module() function. You can import a module and access an object defined within it with the following code:

from importlib import import_module  p, m = name.rsplit('.', 1)  mod = import_module(p) met = getattr(mod, m)  met() 

Answer 2

You don't need to import the individual modules. It is enough to import the module you want to import a name from and provide the fromlist argument:

def import_from(module, name):     module = __import__(module, fromlist=[name])     return getattr(module, name) 

For your example abc.def.ghi.jkl.myfile.mymethod, call this function as

import_from("abc.def.ghi.jkl.myfile", "mymethod") 

(Note that module-level functions are called functions in Python, not methods.)

For such a simple task, there is no advantage in using the importlib module.