What I'm trying to do would look like this in the command line:
>>> import mymodule
>>> names = dir(mymodule)
How can I get a reference to all the names defined in mymodule from within mymodule itself?
Something like this:
# mymodule.py
names = dir(__thismodule__)
Just use globals()
globals() — Return a dictionary representing the current global symbol table. This is always the dictionary of the current module (inside a function or method, this is the module where it is defined, not the module from which it is called).
Also check out the built-in inspect module. It can be very handy.
As previously mentioned, globals gives you a dictionary as opposed to dir() which gives you a list of the names defined in the module. The way I typically see this done is like this:
import sys
dir(sys.modules[__name__])