dir() with string as argument

[Shankar Iyer (siyer]

Hi,

Suppose I have a string, sModuleName, that contains the name of a module. I now want to see what functions are in that module, but if I call dir(sModuleName), I instead get the list of operations that can be done on a string. Is there any way to convert the string into a format that I could feed to dir to cause the desired effect? I think I could modify the string a bit and then use the exec command, but I was advised against that on this board last week.

Shankar

[wittempj]

What about
martin@ubuntu:~ $ python
Python 2.4.1 (#2, Mar 30 2005, 21:51:10)
[GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-8ubuntu2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
py > x = __import__('sys')
py > dir(x)
['__displayhook__', '__doc__', '__excepthook__', '__name__',
'__stderr__', '__stdin__', '__stdout__', '_getframe', 'api_version',
'argv', 'builtin_module_names', 'byteorder', 'call_tracing',
'callstats', 'copyright', 'displayhook', 'exc_clear', 'exc_info',
'exc_type', 'excepthook', 'exec_prefix', 'executable', 'exit',
'getcheckinterval', 'getdefaultencoding', 'getdlopenflags',
'getfilesystemencoding', 'getrecursionlimit', 'getrefcount',
'hexversion', 'maxint', 'maxunicode', 'meta_path', 'modules', 'path',
'path_hooks', 'path_importer_cache', 'platform', 'prefix', 'ps1',
'ps2', 'setcheckinterval', 'setdlopenflags', 'setprofile',
'setrecursionlimit', 'settrace', 'stderr', 'stdin', 'stdout',
'version', 'version_info', 'warnoptions']