Pythonic way to write package for easy importing

Question

I have a very simple package, which I eventually want to release through PyPI, which has a directory tree like the following:

daterangeparser/
   __init__.py
   parse_date_range.py
   test.py

parse_date_range.py defines a function called parse.

What is the easiest and most pythonic way for me to set up the package for easy importing of the parse function, and how can I do it?

At the moment I have to do from daterangeparser.parse_date_range import parse which seems rather clunky. I'd rather do from daterangeparser import parse, which seems simpler and more pythonic, but I can't seem to work out how to get this to work (do I need to put something else in __init__.py? Or, is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

You can simply add:

from .parse_date_range import parse

Into __init__.py to allow this usage. That's the best way.

You could also use an absolute import if you wanted:

from daterangeparser.parse_date_range import parse

Either of these options puts the parse() function into the daterangeparser namespace, which is what you want.