Question

I have some code in the form of a string and would like to make a module out of it without writing to disk.

When I try using imp and a StringIO object to do this, I get:

>>> imp.load_source('my_module', '', StringIO('print "hello world"'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: load_source() argument 3 must be file, not instance
>>> imp.load_module('my_module', StringIO('print "hello world"'), '', ('', '', 0))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: load_module arg#2 should be a file or None

How can I create the module without having an actual file? Alternatively, how can I wrap a StringIO in a file without writing to disk?

UPDATE:

NOTE: This issue is also a problem in python3.

The code I’m trying to load is only partially trusted. I’ve gone through it with ast and determined that it doesn’t import anything or do anything I don’t like, but I don’t trust it enough to run it when I have local variables running around that could get modified, and I don’t trust my own code to stay out of the way of the code I’m trying to import.

I created an empty module that only contains the following:

def load(code):
    # Delete all local variables
    globals()['code'] = code
    del locals()['code']

    # Run the code
    exec(globals()['code'])

    # Delete any global variables we've added
    del globals()['load']
    del globals()['code']

    # Copy k so we can use it
    if 'k' in locals():
        globals()['k'] = locals()['k']
        del locals()['k']

    # Copy the rest of the variables
    for k in locals().keys():
        globals()[k] = locals()[k]

Then you can import mymodule and call mymodule.load(code). This works for me because I’ve ensured that the code I’m loading does not use globals. Also, the global keyword is only a parser directive and can’t refer to anything outside of the exec.

This really is way too much work to import the module without writing to disk, but if you ever want to do this, I believe it’s the best way.

Answer 1

Here is how to import a string as a module (Python 2.x):

import sys,imp

my_code = 'a = 5'
mymodule = imp.new_module('mymodule')
exec my_code in mymodule.__dict__

In Python 3, exec is a function, so this should work:

import sys,imp

my_code = 'a = 5'
mymodule = imp.new_module('mymodule')
exec(my_code, mymodule.__dict__)

Now access the module attributes (and functions, classes etc) as:

print(mymodule.a)
>>> 5

To ignore any next attempt to import, add the module to sys:

sys.modules['mymodule'] = mymodule