Accessing Regina from Python

All of Regina's objects, classes and methods belong to the module called regina. For instance, the main 3-manifold triangulation class is regina.Triangulation3, and the main routine to read a data file is regina.open.

Whenever Regina gives you access to Python (either through a graphical console, a script packet or a command-line session), it will automatically import the regina module (i.e., “import regina”), and it will import all of Regina's objects, classes and methods into the current namespace (i.e., “from regina import *”). As a single exception, it will not import regina.open, so as to not hide Python's own open() function.

This means, for instance, that you create a new triangulation by just calling Triangulation3(), but to read a data file you should still call regina.open(filename). For command-line sessions, if you wish to avoid the heavy-handed “from regina import *”, you can pass the option --noautoimport (in which case you will need to use fully qualified names such as regina.Triangulation3().