I am trying to write some recursive code to explore the methods, classes, functions, builtins, etc. of a package all the way down the hierarchy.
1) Preliminaries In [2]: def explore_pkg(pkg): ...: return dir(pkg) ...: In [3]: import numpy as np In [4]: l2 = explore_pkg(np.random) In [5]: len(l2) Out[5]: 72 # np.random has 72 'things' underneath it In [6]: l2[0:5] Out[6]: ['Lock', 'RandomState', '__RandomState_ctor', '__all__', '__builtins__'] 2) I ultimately need to create inputs to explore_pkg programmatically en route to a recursively called function. The only way I can think of is to use strings. But, passing a string such as 'np.random' into explore_pkg correctly returns the methods/... associated with the string and not the module np.random e.g. explore_pkg('np.random') will NOT do what I want explore_pkg(eval('np.random')) does work but I understand eval is dangerous and not to be trifled with. explore_pkg(getattr(np,'random')) works but if I want to go deeper, I have to nest getattrs. Question: Is there a solution to this "turn a string into the module it represents" problem? I have a vague feeling decorators might be what I need but they've always confused me. I have searched extensively but couldn't find anything directly related to this. --- JBB -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list