How to do multiple imports in Python?

Question

In Ruby, instead of repeating the \"require\" (the \"import\" in Python) word lots of times, I do

%w{lib1 lib2 lib3 lib4 lib5}.each { |x| require x }
         


        

Answer 1

You can use __import__ if you have a list of strings that represent modules, but it's probably cleaner if you follow the hint in the documentation and use importlib.import_module directly:

import importlib
requirements = [lib1, lib2, lib3, lib4, lib5]
imported_libs = {lib: importlib.import_module(lib) for lib in requirements}

You don't have the imported libraries as variables available this way but you could access them through the imported_libs dictionary:

>>> requirements = ['sys', 'itertools', 'collections', 'pickle']
>>> imported_libs = {lib: importlib.import_module(lib) for lib in requirements}
>>> imported_libs
{'collections': ,
 'itertools': ,
 'pickle': ,
 'sys': }

>>> imported_libs['sys'].hexversion
50660592

You could also update your globals and then use them like they were imported "normally":

>>> globals().update(imported_libs)
>>> sys