How to call a function from every module in a directory in Python?

Question

What I want to do is import every module in a directory/package and then call the same function on each submodule, without knowing their names or how many there are.

If you're familiar with MCEdit, (a 3rd party tool for Minecraft) its filter system is like this. All the .py files which are filters go in a directory, and then MCEdit imports each one and is able to show a list of imported filters and execute each one's perform(level, box, options) function.

It seems you need function to get files in folder(s) - like `os.walk()` — furas, Jul 12 '14 at 20:14

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 12 '14 at 20:17

Find every module in that directory, use __import__ to import it, then call the function. For example:

for file_name in os.listdir('path/to/modules'):
    if file_name.startswith('.') or not file_name.ends_with('.py'):
        continue
    module_name = file_name[:-3]
    module = __import__(module_name)
    module.some_function()

However, this does not account for all cases—in particular, some modules might be written in C and have the .pyd extension rather than .py. Do you want to account for that? There are probably several entries in sys.path. Do you want to support all of them, or only search one directory? Modules can reside inside of a ZIP file. You would have to support that. And with import hooks, modules could probably be generated on the fly, and there might be no way to enumerate them. You have to decide how far you want to go when searching for modules. But after you’ve found them, it’s easy to import and use them.

thanks, I think this will work fine. – skyress3000 Jul 12 '14 at 20:36 — skyress3000, Jul 12 '14 at 20:36

How to call a function from every module in a directory in Python?

1 Answers1

Linked