python - Importing from builtin library when module with same name exists

Question

Situation: - There is a module in my project_folder called calendar - I would like to use the built-in Calendar class from the Python libraries - When I use from calendar import Calendar it complains because it's trying to load from my module.

I've done a few searches and I can't seem to find a solution to my problem.

• How to access a standard-library module in Python when there is a local module with the same name?
• http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.5.html
• How to avoid writing the name of the module all the time when importing a module in python?

Any ideas without having to rename my module?

Answer 1

Changing the name of your module is not necessary. Rather, you can use absolute_import to change the importing behavior. For example with stem/socket.py I import the socket module as follows:

from __future__ import absolute_import
import socket

This only works with Python 2.5 and above; it's enabling behavior that is the default in Python 3.0 and higher. Pylint will complain about the code but it's perfectly valid.