__import__()

__import__(name, globals=None, locals=None, fromlist=(), level=0)

This function is invoked by the import statement. It can be replaced (by importing the builtins module and assigning to builtins.__import__) in order to change semantics of the import statement, but doing so is strongly discouraged as it is usually simpler to use import hooks (see PEP 302) to attain the same goals and does not cause issues with code which assumes the default import implementation is in use. Direct use of __import__() is also discouraged in favor of importlib.import_module().

The function imports the module name, potentially using the given globals and locals to determine how to interpret the name in a package context. The fromlist gives the names of objects or submodules that should be imported from the module given by name. The standard implementation does not use its locals argument at all, and uses its globals only to determine the package context of the import statement.

level specifies whether to use absolute or relative imports. 0 (the default) means only perform absolute imports. Positive values for level indicate the number of parent directories to search relative to the directory of the module calling __import__() (see PEP 328 for the details).

When the name variable is of the form package.module, normally, the top-level package (the name up till the first dot) is returned, not the module named by name. However, when a non-empty fromlist argument is given, the module named by name is returned.

For example, the statement import spam results in bytecode resembling the following code:

spam = __import__('spam', globals(), locals(), [], 0)

The statement import spam.ham results in this call:

spam = __import__('spam.ham', globals(), locals(), [], 0)

Note how __import__() returns the toplevel module here because this is the object that is bound to a name by the import statement.

On the other hand, the statement from spam.ham import eggs, sausage as saus results in

_temp = __import__('spam.ham', globals(), locals(), ['eggs', 'sausage'], 0)
eggs = _temp.eggs
saus = _temp.sausage

Here, the spam.ham module is returned from __import__(). From this object, the names to import are retrieved and assigned to their respective names.

If you simply want to import a module (potentially within a package) by name, use importlib.import_module().