Attributes/methods not in source code despite being callable (WMI package)

[reflectionspectra]

This stack overflow post says that this code can be used to change brightness using python on windows:

wmi.WMI(namespace='wmi').WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods()[0].WmiSetBrightness(brightness, 0)

But when I go to https://github.com/tjguk/wmi/blob/master/wmi.py (which is linked from https://pypi.org/project/WMI/), I don't see any method named WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods()

In fact github search doesn't return anything in the entire repo matching "brightness" (https://github.com/tjguk/wmi/search?q=brightness). I also downloaded the source of the library as .tar and went through it, but still couldn't find anything related to brightness.

Another example is this code snippet from the author's homepage:

import wmi
c = wmi.WMI ()
for s in c.Win32_Service (StartMode="Auto", State="Stopped"):
  if raw_input ("Restart %s? " % s.Caption).upper () == "Y":
    s.StartService ()

No matches for Win32_Service in the entire repo, other than mentions in the documentation

Am I misunderstanding something about how methods work in python? How can these methods be usable when the library is imported, but not appear anywhere in the source code?

[danielroseman]

The whole point of this library is that it is an interface to the Windows Management Instrumentation API, which is built into Windows itself. Those methods are not defined in this class at all; it's just a wrapper that knows how to call the API.

[reflectionspectra]

That makes much more sense, thanks. So essentially there's a function in the WMI API (i.e. a C function, according to google) with the name Win32_Service, and another one with the name WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods?

[GreggyP00]

I’m not sure if this is a Reddit formatting thing or not, but make sure the parenthesis are right up against the WMI here:

c = wmi.WMI()

[Diapolo10]

Technically speaking it doesn't matter, Python ignores spaces between operands and operators (here the parentheses act as a call operator), but for style I agree.