A little Python introspection

In Python we can load a module and assign an alias:

import module-name as alias-name

I was asked how a programmer can find the mapping between an alias and the real module. That was rather beyond the scope of the course, but here goes.

The locals() built-in, and it's sister, globals(), were mentioned in the course almost as a 'by the way'. In fact both are very useful for introspection. In this case locals() will give us the name of the module aliases. It also gives us all the other names that are local, but we are only interested in modules. We can use inspect.ismodule() to get only those names that refer to modules. Watch it: locals() returns a dictionary where the keys are the names, but the values are the objects themselves - handle with care. Fortunately, stringifying the object gives us a text string like this:

<module 'GetProcs' from 'C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\GetProcs.pyd'>

and it is simple regular expression to extract the names.

We still have issues. Most obvious is that any modules used for the introspection (inspect and re) are included in the data. In Python 3 we also get issues trying to read the locals dictionary because it changes during a loop (items() returns an iterator in Py3). We can solve both by putting the code into a different module (although there are other solutions). But then, how can we look at our callers namespace? Simple: sys._getframe(1), which exposes just about everything, warts and all. The locals dictionary is avalable through f_locals.

So, here is my module, which I named Spection:

import inspect,sys,re

def look(): 
    for name,val in sys._getframe(1).f_locals.items():
        if inspect.ismodule(val):
            fullnm = str(val)
                if not '(built-in)' in fullnm and \
                   not __name__     in fullnm:
                    m = re.search(r"'(.+)'.*'(.+)'",fullnm)
                    module,path = m.groups()
                    print "%-12s maps to %s" % (name,path)

The user's code looks like this:

import Spection
import glob as wildcard
import ConfigParser as parser
import GetProcs as ps

Spection.look()

And the output looks like:

ps           maps to C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\GetProcs.pyd
parser       maps to C:\Python27\Lib\ConfigParser.pyc
wildcard     maps to C:\Python27\Lib\glob.pyc