find out whether a module exists (without importing it)

[Peter Otten]

Gelonida N wrote:

> Is this possible.
> 
> let's say I'd like to know whether I could import the module
> 'mypackage.mymodule', meaning,
> whther this module is located somewhere in sys.path
> 
> i tried to use
> 
> imp.find_module(), but
> it didn't find any module name containing a '.'

You could look for the toplevel name and then look for modules in the 
corresponding directory. This is not always reliable as a package may not 
correspond to a directory (e. g.: os and os.path), but I don't think you can 
get any closer without performing an actual import.