A library for working with Python modules.

Module Contents

lazy_import(importer_name, to_import)

Returns the importing module and a callable for lazy importing.

The module named by importer_name represents the module performing the import to help facilitate resolving relative imports.

to_import is an iterable of the modules to be potentially imported. Modules may be specified either as absolute and relative names. The attribute name that the specified module is ultimately bound to is specified in one of two ways. First, the general case is the end of the dotted name of the module is what the attribute name will be, e.g. pkg.mod will be bound to mod on the importer module. Second, the as format of importing is also supported, so one may say, e.g. "pkg.mod as spam" and have pkg.mod bound to the attribute spam on the importer module.

This function returns a tuple of two items. The first is the importer module itself for easy reference within itself. The second item is a callable which is expected to be set to __getattr__ within the importer module to allow for lazy importing. For instance:

mod, __getattr__ = lazy_import(__name__, {'sys', '.submodule',
                                          'importlib.abc as i_abc'})

def func():
    return mod.i_abc.answer == 42