How to find all the subclasses of a class given its name?

Here is a simple but efficient version of code:

def get_all_subclasses(cls):
    subclass_list = []

    def recurse(klass):
        for subclass in klass.__subclasses__():
            subclass_list.append(subclass)
            recurse(subclass)

    recurse(cls)

    return set(subclass_list)

Its time complexity is O(n) where n is the number of all subclasses if there's no multiple inheritance. It's more efficient than the functions that recursively create lists or yield classes with generators, whose complexity could be (1) O(nlogn) when the class hierarchy is a balanced tree or (2) O(n^2) when the class hierarchy is a biased tree.

How can I find all subclasses of a class given its name?

We can certainly easily do this given access to the object itself, yes.

Simply given its name is a poor idea, as there can be multiple classes of the same name, even defined in the same module.

I created an implementation for another answer, and since it answers this question and it's a little more elegant than the other solutions here, here it is:

def get_subclasses(cls):
    """returns all subclasses of argument, cls"""
    if issubclass(cls, type):
        subclasses = cls.__subclasses__(cls)
    else:
        subclasses = cls.__subclasses__()
    for subclass in subclasses:
        subclasses.extend(get_subclasses(subclass))
    return subclasses

Usage:

>>> import pprint
>>> list_of_classes = get_subclasses(int)
>>> pprint.pprint(list_of_classes)
[<class 'bool'>,
 <enum 'IntEnum'>,
 <enum 'IntFlag'>,
 <class 'sre_constants._NamedIntConstant'>,
 <class 'subprocess.Handle'>,
 <enum '_ParameterKind'>,
 <enum 'Signals'>,
 <enum 'Handlers'>,
 <enum 'RegexFlag'>]

While I'm very partial to the __init_subclass__ approach, this will preserve definition order, and avoid combinatorial order of growth if you have a very dense hierarchy with multiple inheritance everywhere:

def descendents(cls):
    '''Does not return the class itself'''
    R = {}
    def visit(cls):
        for subCls in cls.__subclasses__():
            R[subCls] = True
            visit(subCls)
    visit(cls)
    return list(R.keys())

This works because dictionaries remember the insertion order of their keys. A list approach would also work.