Published: Oct 9, 2018 by
Most programming languages offer ways to organize your code into namespaces. These namespaces are logical containers that group different names and behaviors together and isolate them to that namespace. By organizing your code with namespaces it makes it easier to structure your application without naming collisions and it can make it easier for you and others to maintain your code by adding some additional organization to your project.
In Python we can use modules and packages to create namespaces that we can then reference in other modules as we build our application.
A Python module is a .py file containing Python definitions and statements. The file name is the module name with the suffix.py appended.
As with all things in Python when we import a module it is an object, and just like other objects it has dunder (double underscore) attributes that define additional data about that module. We can use that to learn more about the module before we ever start to use it.
import pprintext
print(pprintext.doc)
print(dir(pprintext))
A module providing extensions to pretty print structures that pprint may not handle well.
['builtins', 'cached', 'doc', 'file', 'loader', 'name', 'package', 'spec', 'listdirectory', 'os']From the output of dir() we can see there is a function called listdirectory that is part of this module.
pprintext.listdirectory("plugins")
plugins/
ipynb/
init.py
liquid.py
markup.py
requirements.txt
.git
README.md
ipynb.py
LICENSE
.gitignore
core.py
pycache/
core.cpython-36.pyc
init.cpython-36.pyc
markup.cpython-36.pyc
ipynb.cpython-36.pyc
tests/
pelican/
pelicanconfmarkup.py
pelicanconfliquid.py
theme/
templates/
base.html
content/
with-meta-file.ipynb-meta
with-liquid-tag.ipynb
with-metacell.ipynb
with-meta-file.ipynb
with-liquid-tag.md
Finally, we can see where we are importing this module from with .file and we see that this is a module local to our application.
pprintext.file '/home/alex/projects/alexhagerman.github.io/pprintext.py'### Packages
For the sake of brevity and simplicity tonight we can say that a Python package is a collection of Python modules. It is a folder that contains .py file and provides a parent namespace for the modules in the folder.
Another way of saying this is:
Just like we did with our module we can call dir() on our package to see associated attributes and objects.
import pprintextension
dir(pprintextension)
['all',
'builtins',
'cached',
'doc',
'file',
'loader',
'name',
'package',
'path',
'spec',
'network',
'pprintextension']
Additionally, we can call help which may provide more information about the package defined in init.py. You can think of init.py as a place to put initialization behavior and documentation for your package. In the way thatinit handles initializing your class init.py handles the initialization of your package during import.init.py used to be required to make a directory a package, but as of Python 3.3 thanks to pep-420 it is no longer required. More links and information are provided at the end of the notebook.
help(pprintextension)
Help on package pprintextension:
NAME
pprintextension
DESCRIPTION
A package providing functions to pretty print structures that may have alternative renderings from the standard
pprint package.
PACKAGE CONTENTS
filesystem
network
DATA
all = ['filesystem']
FILE
/home/alex/projects/modules-and-packages-into/pprintextension/init.pyAdditionally we can import modules from packages and refer to them directly instead of using the fully qualified namespacing syntax <package>.<module>.<object>
from pprintextension import filesystem
filesystem.listhiddendirectory()
./
.ipynbcheckpoints/
.git/
.idea/Packages go way beyond what we have covered here. As you build packages you want to consider their structure relative to the public API you’re creating. Publishing and distributing packages is a talk or series of talks on its own. For now what we have covered is how we can group modules together in a package and some basics for how to control the initialization behavior of a package.
Finishing up
Now that we know what a Python module and package is next month we will look at the import statement. As a sneak peak I’ll leave you with sys.path and you can begin exploring how this relates to our own packages and modules that make up our application as well as those we might install with tools such as pip or conda.
import sys
sys.path
['',
'/home/alex/miniconda3/envs/blogging/lib/python36.zip',
'/home/alex/miniconda3/envs/blogging/lib/python3.6',
'/home/alex/miniconda3/envs/blogging/lib/python3.6/lib-dynload',
'/home/alex/miniconda3/envs/blogging/lib/python3.6/site-packages',
'/home/alex/miniconda3/envs/blogging/lib/python3.6/site-packages/IPython/extensions',
'/home/alex/.ipython']<https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.path>