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I write here about programming, how to program better, things I think are neat and are related to programming. I might write other things at my personal website.

I am happily employed by the excellent Caktus Group, located in beautiful and friendly Carrboro, NC, where I work with Python, Django, and Javascript.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

The Implied Module Path

We all know there is an implied path to import from for the main module, but it seems a few people get mixed about the details of how this works. In particular, it seems that this path is being confused for the current working directory. Here is a little note to help remember the distinction.

  • Any module implicitly can import packages and modules in the same directory its file resides in, which is os.path.dirname(the_module.__file__)
  • Often you run a script, when starting out, from its own directory, so that this implied path is the current working directory. This fact is purely a coincidence.
The result boils down simply to understanding that any import can be relative to the module it appears in, and if you run a local (not system-wide available) script, that just happens to be your current directory, by coincidence.