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I’ve seen it a lot in python/Lib source code but I don’t know what it is for.
I thought it was used to limit accessible members of of a module. So only the elements at __all__ will show up when dir(module).
I did a little example and saw it was not working as I expected.
So… What’s the python __all__ module level variable for?
It has two purposes:
Anybody who reads the source will know what the exposed public API is. It doesn’t prevent them from poking around in private declarations, but does provide a good warning not to.
When using
from mod import *, only names listed in__all__will be imported. This is not as important, in my opinion, because importing everything is a really bad idea.