Call imported function in python using string

Question

I have a list of the names of imported functions, which I can call as follows:

from myfile import function1
from myfile import function2
function1()
function2()

How would I call the functions from a list of names? For example:

fns = ['function1', 'function2']
for fn in fns:
 fn()

How would I do the above properly?

Answer 1

don't use a list of strings, just store the functions in the list:

fns = [function1, function2]
for fn in fns:
 fn()

Answer 2

You can access to function objects from globals() namespace, but note that this is not a general approach, since first of all your imported objects should be callable (have __call__ attribute) and they should be present in global name space.:

for fn in fns:
 try:
 globals()[fn]()
 except KeyError:
 raise Exception("The name {} is not in global namespace".format(fn))

Example:

>>> from itertools import combinations, permutations
>>> 
>>> l = ['combinations', 'permutations']
>>> for i in l:
... print(list(globals()[i]([1, 2, 3], 2)))
... 
[(1, 2), (1, 3), (2, 3)]
[(1, 2), (1, 3), (2, 1), (2, 3), (3, 1), (3, 2)]

• Tadhg McDonald-Jensen: I do not recommend using introspection tools for production code, there are many cases where this won't necessarily work as expected such as trying importing the module itself won't work: import math l globals()["math.sqrt"](4)
• Kasravnd: @TadhgMcDonald-Jensen Indeed, I was updating the answer.