python : imported packages with 'nested' modules

Question

When i import modules , this nested scenario works fine. But when i try to import packages , i got inconsistent result. Here's the very simple case :

contents of my current folder :

mypackages <directory>
 __init__.py 
 one.py
 two.py
 three.py

this is the script :

__init__.py :
import one
one.py :
import two
two.py :
import three

I'm expecting that i should be able to access two and three this way :

import mypackages
mypackages.one.two
mypackages.one.two.three

or in other word the logical level shoul be like this :

one
 two
 three

But when i do import mypackages, i got all the modules exposed at the same level :

>>> import mypackages
>>> print dir(mypackages)
['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '__package__', 
'__path__', 'one', 'three', 'two']

It should only show one module , right ? I'm confused why it shows all one , two and three which means they are at the same level ( i can use mypackages.two and mypackages.three directly ).

Does anyone have any explaination ?

Answer 1

You should read this.

By putting the files at the same level, you put them is the same package level. In your case, you need to get this architecture:

mypackage
├── __init__.py
├── one.py # contains "import two"
└── two
 ├── __init__.py
 ├── two.py # contains "import three"
 └── three
  ├── __init__.py
  └── three.py

And then, you can access the package with:

import mypackage.one
import mypackage.one.two
import mypackage.one.two.three

• akinuri: Care to expand this to cover the usage of functions and classes from the subpackages?
• aluriak: You mean, how to access members of the module objects ?
• akinuri: Yes. I tried the suggested solution, but couldn't make it work. In a dir, I have a folder intl which contains a file (scanner.py), and wanted to turn it into a package. In the main file, doing import intl and scanner = intl.Scanner() didn't work. I had to modify __init__.py and add from .scanner import Scanner in it... So, a use case for using a function and a class from packages/subpackages would improve this answer, because it doesn't mention anything about modifying the __init__.py. While I managed to get my script to work, I don't know if I took the right approach :)