conditional importing

[Gerhard Häring]

* Scott Hathaway <slhath at charter.net> [2002-07-28 20:29 -0500]:
> How can I do a conditional import?  I am creating a database wrapper class
> that is similar to adodb in PHP.
> I have the following class:
> 
> >from mx.ODBC import Windows as db1
> import MySQLdb as db2

Better use something like:

module_name = "MySQLdb"
try:
    dbmodule = __import__(module_name)
except ImportError, reason:
    # error handling here

def open_connection(*args, **kwargs):
    return dbmodule.connect(*args, **kwargs)

Unfortunately, the arguments for the connect method aren't standardized.
But at least some modules allow for a single connection string where the
arguments (host, user, passwd, ...) are separated by colons.

Gerhard
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