Statically analyzing a Python module to find assignments

I want to let my users write an __init__.py module like this:

'''
This is the simpack's docstring.

Bla bla bla.
'''

name = 'Name of the simpack'

tags = ['list', 'of', 'simpack-tags']

__version__ = '0.9.3'

And I want my program to be able to get all of these things: The docstring, the name, the tags and the version. But I want to do it without importing the module, because __init__.py might import the entire package which can be heavy. (I want to do this process for many heavy simpacks.)

We can assume that the user doesn't do anything c开发者_开发百科omputationally trickier then a simple literal assignment.

I heard that the ast module does things like this. But, I also want to be able to do this process on compiled files, e.g. __init__.pyc or __init__.pyo, and I don't know how to do this with the ast module.

Can the ast module do this on both source and compiled files? How is it done? Otherwise, is there a more fitting tool than ast?

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What you propose smells of difficulty and lack of robustness ... the ast component is likely to introduce version dependencies in your code.

Alternative: Instead of trying to analyse thepackage/__init__.py[co]?, have the users write a thepackage/userconfig.py. Then you can do import thepackage.userconfig without importing the whole contents of thepackage

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An alternative approach is to use 2 steps process:

• generate metadata in an easy-to-read format (such as *.egg-info files) during creation of source tarballs, eggs, etc. This step imports the __init__.py file. This step is triggered by a user action such as setup.py sdist
• read this metadata. This step doesn't import anything. It deals only with a simple text files