And now for something completely boneheaded...

[Philip Lijnzaad]

> So with a given module, once imported, what is the way by which I can find
> out what's defined in the module 

Number of ways ... first of all, of course, RTFM. 

Next, print the doc string.  Incidentally, many objects (including functions
such as dir, see below) have this __doc__ string:
>>> print sys.__doc__

Next, use the dir function, which prints the 'attributes' of the object. For a
module, attributes means the names defined in the module:
>>> dir(sys)


Next, each scope is represented by a dictionary which is available under its
__dict__  attribute, so you can print that too
>>> print sys.__dict__


And to make this more readable, try
>>> for i in sys.__dict__.keys(): print i,":", sys.__dict__[i]


And I'm sure there are other ways. 

> and, ideally, how to access it?

why, 

  module.name   for referring to things
  module.name[] for indexing into things
  module.name() for calling things



Cheers,

                                                                      Philip

-- 
The cause of the millenium bug is Homo Sapiens having 10 fingers
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