How does one do the equivalent of “import * from module” with Python's __import__ function?

Question

Given a string with a module name, how do you import everything in the module as if you had called:

from module import *

i.e. given string

Answer 1

I didn't find a good way to do it so I took a simpler but ugly way from http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/600/

try:
    import socket
    hostname = socket.gethostname().replace('.','_')
    exec "from host_settings.%s import *" % hostname
except ImportError, e:
    raise e