# 18.7 `pyclbr` -- Python class browser support

The `pyclbr` can be used to determine some limited information about the classes, methods and top-level functions defined in a module. The information provided is sufficient to implement a traditional three-pane class browser. The information is extracted from the source code rather than by importing the module, so this module is safe to use with untrusted source code. This restriction makes it impossible to use this module with modules not implemented in Python, including many standard and optional extension modules.

`readmodule`( | module[, path])

  Read a module and return a dictionary mapping class names to class descriptor objects. The parameter module should be the name of a module as a string; it may be the name of a module within a package. The path parameter should be a sequence, and is used to augment the value of `sys.path`, which is used to locate module source code.

`readmodule_ex`( | module[, path])

  Like `readmodule()`, but the returned dictionary, in addition to mapping class names to class descriptor objects, also maps top-level function names to function descriptor objects. Moreover, if the module being read is a package, the key `'__path__'` in the returned dictionary has as its value a list which contains the package search path.