Python 3 package module conflicts with standard module

Question

I recently decided to upgrade to python 3, and start converting some of my scripts. I encountered a problem in a script that uses a module named io - in python 2, this is perfectly fine, however in python 3, io is a standard module for files. I found this old question about the same kind of problem, however this appears to be in reference to python 2. I have the opposite problem - given two files, main.py and io.py in the top level package, import io in main.py will import the standard io module, not the local one. from __future__ import absolute_imports didn't help, and from . import io and related attempts fail as expected (which I have never understood - python really doesn't know where the top level package is?). Renaming is obviously a solution, but if possible I'd like to avoid it. Is there some python 3 standard way of resolving module name conflicts?

Answer 1

Here's my answer:-

My directory structure:-

calvin$ tree /Users/calvin/work/learn3/
/Users/calvin/work/learn3/
└── myspecialpackage
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── __init__.pyc
    ├── io.py
    ├── io.pyc
    └── main.py

__init__.py is an empty file.

io.py is your custom module which conflicts with python3's io module.

main.py contains this bunch of example code:-

import os
import sys

# These two lines are not needed you are installing the `myspecialpackage` via pip/pypi and as setup.py script places "myspecialpackage" and all its contents in your python site-packages, which is already in PYTHONPATH.
our_package_root = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
sys.path.append(our_package_root)

from myspecialpackage import io
print(io.__file__)

And the imported io module will be the one in your io.py and not python3's module.

As a bonus, using this methodology will allow us to have your custom io.py as well as python3's io module (if you so desire having your cake and eat it ;-)). You can deconflict the use of the namespace io like this:-

from myspecialpackage import io as my_special_io
print(my_special_io.__file__)

import io
print(io.__file__)

Running main.py will then give you:-

In [3]: run myspecialpackage/main.py
/Users/calvin/work/learn3/myspecialpackage
./myspecialpackage/io.py
/Users/calvin/.virtualenvs/learn3/bin/../lib/python3.3/io.py

Take note of the comment I made above regarding

our_package_root = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
sys.path.append(our_package_root)