Question

I’m trying to access some underscored functions in a submodule of pandas (in particular I want to reuse their date-conversion code), but they are prefixed with an underscore and as such not available to me. Is there any way to circumvent this behaviour?

Answer 1

Methods are not really private in python.

You can still access methods prefixed with underscores but you’re just not supposed to do so.

“Private” instance variables that cannot be accessed except from inside an object don’t exist in Python. However, there is a convention that is followed by most Python code: a name prefixed with an underscore (e.g. _spam) should be treated as a non-public part of the API (whether it is a function, a method or a data member). It should be considered an implementation detail and subject to change without notice.

from Python.org : Private Variables and Class-local References