__import__ in Python

Table of Contents

It’s known that Python’s import statement is implemented by __import__ function. In general, if we want to import a module dynamically, we can use import_module function, which is a wrapper around __import__.

The most important difference between these two functions is that import_module() returns the specified package or module (e.g. pkg.mod), while import() returns the top-level package or module (e.g. pkg). – https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.html#importlib.import_module

import itertools and from requests import exceptions can be translated to:

import importlib

itertools = importlib.import_module('itertools')
exceptions = importlib.import_module('requests.exceptions')

`import` #

This is an advanced function that is not needed in everyday Python programming, unlike importlib.import_module().

Here is an example of how __import__ is called:

old_import = __import__

def noisy_importer(name, globals=None, locals=None, fromlist=None, level=0):
    print(f'name: {name!r}')
    print(f'fromlist: {fromlist}')
    print(f'level: {level}')
    print('-' * 80)
    return old_import(name, locals, globals, fromlist, level)

import builtins
builtins.__import__ = noisy_importer

print('import math')
import math
print('from math import sqrt')
from math import sqrt

>>>
import math
name: 'math'
fromlist: None
level: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from math import sqrt
name: 'math'
fromlist: ('sqrt',)
level: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As we mentioned earlier, the __import__ returns the top level module.

For example, requests=__import('requests.exceptions',globals(),locals(),[],0). If you want to get the submodule exceptions, you need to use getattr: equests_exceptions=getattr(__import__('requests', globals(), locals(), [], 0), 'exceptions').

There is another tricky way to import the submodule: use a non-empty fromlist: requests_exceptions = __import__('requests.exceptions', globals(), locals(), [None], 0).

Additionally, we can also set fromlist to specify the names of submodules that should be imported. The statement from spam.ham import eggs, sausage as saus can be translated to

_temp = __import__('spam.ham', globals(), locals(), ['eggs', 'sausage'], 0)
eggs = _temp.eggs
saus = _temp.sausage

Skip importing non-existing modules with `import` #

This a use case of the __import__ function. Some packages are missing, but we want to make sure that the code does not crash when importing them.

import builtins
from unittest.mock import Mock
old_import = __import__

def skip_imports(name, globals=None, locals=None, fromlist=None, level=0):
    skip_list = {'urllib3', 'requests_oauthlib', 'cryptography'}
    if name in skip_list or any(name.startswith(f'{p}.') for p in skip_list):
        return Mock()
    else:
        return old_import(name, globals, locals, fromlist, level)

builtins.__import__ = skip_imports

Ref:

__import__ #

Skip importing non-existing modules with __import__ #

`import` #

Skip importing non-existing modules with `import` #