Question

I’m currently writing an autocompletion for python. Therefore I need to find the modules, that are imported.

This seems pretty easy with imp.find_module, but it doesn’t work if I insert a path, which is important for an autocompletion. Inserting a path means, that it won’t find the system modules.

The solution would be to get the PYTHONPATH and then, insert it. But that is really not a nice way to do it, since I just want the default path. Additionally PYTHONPATH is not even in my os.environ[].

Is there really no alternative to this complicated procedure? And if there is not, how can I get the default paths to the libraries?

Is there maybe even a better solution, which crawls automatically through the directories?

Note: Since I’m writing an autocompletion, I don’t want to actually import/execute any code.

Answer 1

To get the path of the standard libraries use:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/usr/lib/python27.zip', '/usr/lib/python2.7', ...]

Using these paths you can search through them by using os.listdir, such as:

import sys, os 
standardlib = os.listdir(sys.path[n])

You will have check if you check if the path is a directory.

stdlibs = []
for lib in sys.path:
    if os.path.isdir(lib): 
        for module in os.listdir(lib):
            stdlibs.append(lib + "/" + module)

You might have to check this recursively and check for extensions.

This will get you the idea where to start.

You will also have to check your current directory (os.getcwd()) for files that can be a part of a package (python package structure).