On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > The importer mechanism as far as I know only accepts module names, not > filesystem paths; I believe this is by design. You could imitate it by > doing something like this: > > import imp > import sys > > mod = imp.new_module('spam') > exec(open('/path/to/spam.py').read(), mod.__dict__) > sys.modules['spam'] = mod
That's a bit better than just working with a bare dictionary as I did, but it's still getting a bit heavy-handed with the details. How is __main__ imported? Presumably that one, at least, can be loaded from a specific file. Or is that pure magic? > Is 'spam' really the appropriate name for this module? What if there is > already a different module with the name 'spam'? Presumably if the module > is named 'spam' then it should be importable as 'spam', but then why the > need for the path-based import? Alternatively, you might name the module > something like "</path/to/spam.py>", which surely won't collide with > anything imported by the normal mechanism, but then what if the spam module > is also imported by normal means? You would end up with two copies of the > same module with different names. The same problem already exists with __main__ - I was hoping to replicate that, not necessarily to solve all its problems :) I'm okay with using a fixed name (either "__main__" or something that doesn't collide with that), for the purposes of experimentation. I know the recent Pythons give a lot of import power to the script. But maybe I'm just asking too much, and some of this stuff really is magical and implemented in C? ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list