How to get a list of all the Python standard library modules?

I want something like sys.builtin_module_names except for the standard library. Other things that didn't work:

• sys.modules - only shows modules that have already been loaded
• sys.prefix - a path that would include non-standard library modules and doesn't seem to work inside a virtualenv.

The reason I want this list is so that I can pass it to the --ignore-module or --ignore-dir command line options of trace.

So ultimately, I want to know how to ignore all the standard library modules when using trace or sys.settrace.

Solution 1:

I brute forced it by writing some code to scrape the TOC of the Standard Library page in the official Python docs. I also built a simple API for getting a list of standard libraries (for Python version 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4).

The package is here, and its usage is fairly simple:

>>> from stdlib_list import stdlib_list
>>> libraries = stdlib_list("2.7")
>>> libraries[:10]
['AL', 'BaseHTTPServer', 'Bastion', 'CGIHTTPServer', 'ColorPicker', 'ConfigParser', 'Cookie', 'DEVICE', 'DocXMLRPCServer', 'EasyDialogs']

Solution 2:

Why not work out what's part of the standard library yourself?

import distutils.sysconfig as sysconfig
import os
std_lib = sysconfig.get_python_lib(standard_lib=True)
for top, dirs, files in os.walk(std_lib):
    for nm in files:
        if nm != '__init__.py' and nm[-3:] == '.py':
            print os.path.join(top, nm)[len(std_lib)+1:-3].replace(os.sep, '.')

gives

abc
aifc
antigravity
--- a bunch of other files ----
xml.parsers.expat
xml.sax.expatreader
xml.sax.handler
xml.sax.saxutils
xml.sax.xmlreader
xml.sax._exceptions

Edit: You'll probably want to add a check to avoid site-packages if you need to avoid non-standard library modules.

Solution 3:

Take a look at this, https://docs.python.org/3/py-modindex.html They made an index page for the standard modules.