Unresolved Import Issues with PyDev and Eclipse

Question

I am very new to PyDev and Python, though I have used Eclipse for Java plenty. I am trying to work through some of the Dive Into Python examples and this feels like an extremely trivial problem that's just becoming exceedingly annoying. I am using Ubuntu Linux 10.04.

I want to be able to use the file odbchelper.py, which is located in the directory /Desktop/Python_Tutorials/diveintopython/py

Here is my example.py file that I'm working on in my PyDev/Eclipse project:

import sys sys.path.append("~/Desktop/Python_Tutorials/diveintopython/py") 

This works fine, but then I want the next line of my code to be:

import odbchelper 

and this causes an unresolved import error every time. I have added __init__.py files to just about every directory possible and it doesn't help anything. I've tried adding __init__.py files one at a time to the various levels of directories between the project location and the odbchelper.py file, and I've also tried adding the __init__.py files to all of the directories in between simultaneously. Neither works.

All I want to do is have a project somewhere in some other directory, say /Desktop/MyStuff/Project, in which I have example.py ... and then from example.py I want to import odbchelper.py from /Desktop/Python_Tutorials/diveintopython/py/

Every message board response I can find just saying to use the sys.path.append() function to add this directory to my path, and then import it ... but that is precisely what I am doing in my code and it's not working.

I have also tried the Ctrl-1 trick to suppress the error message, but the program is still not functioning correctly. I get an error, ImportError: No module named odbchelper. So it's clearly not getting the path added, or there is some problem that all of my many permutations of adding __init__.py files has missed.

It's very frustrating that something this simple... calling things from some file that exists somewhere else on my machine... requires this much effort.

Answer 1

In the properties for your pydev project, there's a pane called "PyDev - PYTHONPATH", with a sub-pane called "External Libraries". You can add source folders (any folder that has an __init__.py) to the path using that pane. Your project code will then be able to import modules from those source folders.