Python in a Nutshell

Name

__import__

Synopsis

__import__(module_name[,globals[,locals[,fromlist]]])

Loads the module named by string module_name and returns the resulting module object. globals, which defaults to the result of globals( ), and locals, which defaults to the result of locals( ) (both covered in this section), are dictionaries that __import__ treats as read-only and uses only to get context for package-relative imports, covered in Section 7.3. fromlist defaults to an empty list, but can be a list of strings that name the module attributes to be imported in a from statement. See Section 7.2 for more details on module loading.

In practice, when you call __import__, you generally pass only the first argument, except in the rare and dubious case in which you use __import__ for a package-relative import. When you replace the built-in __import__ function with your own in order to provide special import functionality, you may have to take globals, locals, and fromlist into account.