Something like this? It avoids using globals, which is generally a good thing.
import whatever
import functools
def prefix_function(function, prefunction):
@functools.wraps(function)
def run(*args, **kwargs):
prefunction(*args, **kwargs)
return function(*args, **kwargs)
return run
def this_is_a_function(parameter):
pass # Your own code here that will be run before
whatever.this_is_a_function = prefix_function(
whatever.this_is_a_function, this_is_a_function)
prefix_function is a function that takes two functions: function and prefunction. It returns a function that takes any parameters, and calls prefunction followed by function with the same parameters. The prefix_function function works for any callable, so you only need to program the prefixing code once for any other hooking you might need to do.
@functools.wraps makes it so that the docstring and name of the returned wrapper function is the same.
If you need this_is_a_function to call the old whatever.this_is_a_function with arguments different than what was passed to it, you could do something like this:
import whatever
import functools
def wrap_function(oldfunction, newfunction):
@functools.wraps(oldfunction)
def run(*args, **kwargs):
return newfunction(oldfunction, *args, **kwargs)
return run
def this_is_a_function(oldfunc, parameter):
# Do some processing or something to customize the parameters to pass
newparams = parameter * 2 # Example of a change to newparams
return oldfunc(newparams)
whatever.this_is_a_function = wrap_function(
whatever.this_is_a_function, this_is_a_function)
There is a problem that if whatever is a pure C module, it's typically impossible (or very difficult) to change its internals in the first place.
whateveris. What is it in this case? Is it your own module?return oldfunc(parameter)instead of justoldfunc(parameter). Are you having a problem with it?