Python import statement semantics

Question

I\'m having difficulty understanding the import statement and its variations.

Suppose I\'m using the lxml module for scraping websites.

The followin

Answer 1

Let's take an example of a package pkg with two module in it a.py and b.py:

--pkg
   |
   | -- a.py
   |
   | -- b.py
   |
   | -- __init__.py

in __init__.py you are importing a.py and not b.py:

import a

So if you open your terminal and do:

>>> import pkg
>>> pkg.a
>>> pkg.b
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'b'

As you can see because we have imported a.py in pkg's __init__.py, we was able to access it as an attribute of pkg but b is not there, so to access this later we should use:

>>> import pkg.b   # OR: from pkg import b

HTH,