I know eval() is bad practice; is there an alternative for my code which involves getting the __doc__ of all funcs in all files in a folder?

Question

I'm making a project which involves importing a directory as a module (it has an __init__.py) then iterating through all files in that directory and printing the docstring of all the functions in each file.

This is my main.py code, in which I have to use eval() to convert the file name from a string to an actual file object.

import fruits
from fruits import *

docs = []

for file in fruits.__all__:
    tmp = []

    for name, object in vars(eval(file)).items():
        if callable(object):
            tmp.append(object.__doc__)

    docs.append(tmp)

And here is my __init__.py:

from os.path import dirname, basename, isfile, join
import glob

fruits = glob.glob(join(dirname(__file__), "*.py"))

__all__ = [basename(f)[:-3] for f in fruits if isfile(f) and not f.endswith("__init__.py")]

The contents of fruits/ is a few files named things like apple.py and orange.py that each have a few functions that just print "hello" and have a docstring consisting of their name. I know I could do the main.py more efficiently with list comprehension; but i'm just playing around and testing it at this stage.

I would rather not have to use eval() so if you know of an alternative way to accomplish this I would be very grateful.

Thank you

Answer 1

Your variables should be accessible in globals() so you can just

    for name, object in vars(globals()[file]).items():