Is there a better way to determine something is a module in python

Question

I have the name of an 'thing' in python. I want to check if this 'thing' is a module or not. I can do it with the below code:

mod = eval(module_name)
print inspect.ismodule(mod)

I don't like the idea of calling eval. Is there a better way to get from the module_name, which is a string, to the actual module object?

Answer 1

Just try build-in __import__ function:

>>> __import__('aaa')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#5>", line 1, in <module>
    __import__('aaa')
ImportError: No module named aaa
>>> __import__('os')
<module 'os' from 'C:\Python26\lib\os.pyc'>

So you code might look like next:

try:
    __import__(mod_name)
    print 'Such a module exists'
except ImportError:
    print 'No such module'