Python importlib's analogue for imp.new_module()

Question

PyCharm shows me that imp is deprecated so I wonder if there any analogue of imp.new_module for importlib.

score 23 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

23

Quoting from documentation (Emphasis mine) -

imp.new_module(name)

Return a new empty module object called name. This object is not inserted in sys.modules.

Deprecated since version 3.4: Use types.ModuleType instead.

Example -

>>> import types
>>> types.ModuleType('name')
<module 'name'>

To show how they are synonymous -

>>> import imp
>>> imp.new_module('name')
<module 'name'>

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Aug 24 '15 at 06:33

Anand S Kumar

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The only problem is, 3.6 documentation does recommend importlib's module_from_spec, but it seems impossible to use it in such a way. Modules constructed with types.ModuleType have None as `__spec__`, but `module_from_spec(None)` doesn't work. – Veky Jun 01 '16 at 13:24

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 29 '22 at 00:36

Python documentation suggests to us:

Note Use importlib.util.module_from_spec() to create a new module if you wish to set the various import-controlled attributes.

importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec) is preferred over using types.ModuleType to create a new module as spec is used to set as many import-controlled attributes on the module as possible.

To import a Python source file directly, we can use the following snippet:

import importlib.util
import sys


spec = importlib.util.spec_from_file_location(module_name, file_path)
module = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec)
sys.modules[module_name] = module
spec.loader.exec_module(module)

The example below, we can use to implement lazy imports:

import importlib.util
import sys

def lazy_import(name):
    spec = importlib.util.find_spec(name)
    loader = importlib.util.LazyLoader(spec.loader)
    spec.loader = loader
    module = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec)
    sys.modules[name] = module
    loader.exec_module(module)
    return module

>>> lazy_typing = lazy_import("typing")
>>> #lazy_typing is a real module object,
>>> #but it is not loaded in memory yet.
>>> lazy_typing.TYPE_CHECKING
False

Python importlib's analogue for imp.new_module()

2 Answers2