How does one do the equivalent of “import * from module” with Python's __import__ function?

Question

Given a string with a module name, how do you import everything in the module as if you had called:

from module import *

i.e. given string

Answer 1

It appears that you can also use dict.update() on module's dictionaries in your case:

config = [__import__(name) for name in names_list]

options = {}
for conf in config:
    options.update(conf.__dict__)

Update: I think there's a short "functional" version of it:

options = reduce(dict.update, map(__import__, names_list))