Creation of a class instance by reflection in Python does not work

Question

I have the following code:

theModule = locate(<the location of my python script in the file system>)
class_ = getattr(theModule, '<the class of my module>')
myAppli = class_()

But I always have an AttributeError exception when trying to perform the "getattr" method.

My objective was to create a Python class from a file somewhere in the file system, and execute methods on it by reflection without using the class declaration in the Python code.

Example

For example, I have the following python script, let's say that the name of the script file is: myScript.py

import sys

class PythonAppli:
  def aMethod(self):
    sys.echo('I am here\n')

And I perform this in another script in the same directory:

from pydoc import locate

theModule = locate('myScript.py')
class_ = getattr(theModule, 'pythonAppli')
myAppli = class_()

I have the following exception on the "getattr" line:

AttributeError: class PythonAppli has no attribute 'pythonAppli'

Note that if I add this line before my "getattr" method call:

inspect.getmembers(theModule)

I find 'pythonAppli' in the list of attributes.

I looked on the question about dynamic instanciation on StackOverflow but could not find my error here.

Answer 1

Per MisterMiyagi answer, my mistake was theModule was already my desired class. The following code did work:

from pydoc import locate

theModule = locate('myScript.py')
pythonAppli = theModule()

So it was much more simple that I imagined.