Question

I’m just starting out in python after years of Java, C, c++, etc.
I have a long list of files/modules that each contain one major method that I want to call dynamically. For each keyword, I have a .py file with the name get_foo and inside each get_foo.py, there is a foo method. So I want to pass in the command name “foo” and execute the method get_foo.foo()

I really don’t want to do this with an ugly if/then/else block

sections = [ "abstract",  "claim",  "drawing", "examiner"]
command = "claim"

What I want to something like

exec("get_" + command + "." + command)

But I really don’t know even which areas of exec/eval/etc do this.

Answer 1

Use the importlib module to dynamically import, and getattr() to find your function:

import importlib

def call_command(cmd):
    mod = importlib.import_module('get_' + cmd)
    func = getattr(mod, cmd)
    return func()

Or, simply import all your modules and add them to a dict to map command to callable:

import get_foo, get_bar, get_baz

commands = dict(foo=get_foo.foo, bar=get_bar.bar, baz=get_baz.baz)

def call_command(cmd):
    return commands[cmd]()