Import a python package when the module has the same name

Question

I have a blah.time module where I perform some health checks and wrapper functions around the usual time and date operations:

 import time def sleep(n): time.sleep(n) 

When I call sleep , it just generates the maximum recursion error. I assume the namespace is incorrect, so I tried to use import time as _time , but I still get the same error.

How can I refer to the time module from my own module to prevent this namespace conflict?

Answer 1

Add from __future__ import absolute_import as the first line in your file.

This will result in all imports being absolute rather than relative. Thus, import time imports the standard module to import the local module that you would use from . import foobar from . import foobar

Answer 2

I would read http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.5.html#pep-328-absolute-and-relative-imports and then use from __future__ import absolute_import .

NTN

Answer 3

What happens is your time module obscures the system’s time module. The easiest way to solve the problem is to rename your module to something other than time .