How to call a builtin function (or method) from C code of a Python extension module?

Question

What I currently want to accomplish is to tweak Pythons itertools module function combinations to sort the passed iterable before creatin

Answer 1

You should get the sorted function out of the builtins and than call it:

PyObject *builtins = PyEval_GetBuiltins(); 
PyObject *sorted = PyDict_GetItemString(builtins , "sorted");
PyObject *sorted_list = PyEval_CallFunction(sorted, "(O)", iterable);

//... do something with the sorted_list

Py_DECREF(sorted_list);