Relative imports in Python

Question

Hey all -- I am pulling my hair out with relative imports in Python. I've read the documentation 30 times and numerous posts here on SO and other forums -- still doesn't seem to work.

My directory structure currently looks like this

src/     __init__.py     main.py     components/         __init__.py         expander.py         language_id.py     utilities/         __init__.py         functions.py 

I want expander.py and language_id.py to have access to the functions module. I run python main.py which accesses the modules just fine with from components.expander import * and components.language_id import *.

However, the code inside expander and language_id to access the functions module:

from ..utilities.functions import * 

I receive this error:

ValueError: Attempted relative import beyond toplevel package 

I have gone over it a bunch of times and it seems to follow the documentation. Anyone have any ideas of what's going wrong here?

Answer 1

Nevermind, I solved it:

src/     main.py     mod/         __init__.py         components/             __init__.py             expander.py             language_id.py         utilities/             __init__.py             functions.py 

main.py then refers to the subpackages as:

from mod.components.expander import * from mod.utilities.functions import * 

expander.py and language_id.py have access to functions.py with:

from ..utilities.functions import * 

But the interesting thing is that I had a text file inside the components directory that expander.py uses. However, at runtime it couldn't locate the file even though it was in the same directory. I moved the text file to the same directory as main.py and it worked. Seems counter-intuitive.