Turn python script into a function

Question

Assume I wrote a script morning.py which does a simple print statement

# morning.py
print 'Good morning'

Some hours later I've realized that I have to use this script in another script named evening.py. I am aware of two options. First, to invoke morning.py as a subprocess

# evening.py
import subprocess
import shlex
process = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split('python morning.py'))
process.communicate()

This is the way I've initially chosen. The problem is that I want to pack my program (morning + evening) into a single executable. And to my understanding, from the exe file such call just won't work.

Another option is to turn module morning into a function. For instance, like that

# morning.py
def morning_func():
   print 'Good morning'

Then I can simply call this function from the evening module

# evening
import morning
morning.morning_func()

Here the problem is that unlike morning my actual initial script is quite extended and messy. There is no single function that I can execute to simulate script running flow. Wrapping the whole script in a function just does not feel right.

What are possible solutions?

Answer 1

The common usage is to always declare functions (and/or classes) in a module that can be used by other modules and to add at the end a if __name__ == '__main__': test to directly exec something if the script is called directly.

In your example, it would give:

# morning.py
def morning_func():
   print 'Good morning'


if __name__ == '__main__':
    # call morning func
    morning_func()

That way, you can execute it simply as python morning.py or include it in other Python files to call morning_func from there