Importing v reloading modules modules

[Peter Peyman Puk]

Hello

I submitted this earlier today, but I was not clear enough, so I am  
posting it again.

I am running a simulator written in python. The simulator has a small  
TextView (actually a SourceView) widget which lets the user writes  
scripts, and when they are satisfied they can execute that script to  
get results. For arguments sake, we write a simple script and save it  
as A.py and we import it and execute it more or less like so.

import A

#assume there is a function called test() in module A
A.test()


Then the user modifies the contents of A.py and saves it again (to  
A.py) now all we have to do is the following

if 'A' in dir():
  reload(A)
else:
  import A

A.test()

But since the user chooses the file name, and not me, the programmer,  
the module names will vary. Let's assume the module names are loaded  
and stored in the list module_names, and we iterate over them, and  
pass them as arguments to a function to import or reload each model as  
appropriate

def import_or_reload(module_name):

  if module_name in sys.modules:
   #somehow reload
  else:
   #somehow import

does anyone know how to deal with the reload and import as they both  
present problems since module_name is a string, and to reload  
something along the lines of the below must be executed

exec 'reload(%s)'%module_name

and then we also have to deal with the scope issue since the loaded  
module will be local and not global. I can execute something like so

exec 'global %s'%module_name

but that does not work very well with exec

any suggestions?

Cheers


Peyman