Suppose I have a package containing two submodules and also a substantial amount of code in __init__.py itself:
pkg/__init__.py
pkg/foo.py
pkg/bar.py
and, to make planned future refactorings easier, I want components of the package to exclusively use relative imports to refer to each other. In particular, import pkg should never appear.
From foo.py I can do
from __future__ import absolute_import
from . import bar
to get access to the bar.py module, and vice versa.
The question is, what do I write to import __init__.py in this manner? I want exactly the same effect as import pkg as local_name, only without having to specify the absolute name pkg.
#import pkg as local_name
from . import ??? as local_name
UPDATE: Inspired by maxymoo's answer, I tried
from . import __init__ as local_name
This does not set local_name to the the module defined by __init__.py; it instead gets what appears to be a bound method wrapper for the __init__ method of that module. I suppose I could do
from . import __init__ as local_name
local_name = local_name.__self__
to get the thing I want, but (a) yuck, and (b) this makes me worry that the module hasn't been fully initialized.
Answers need to work on both Python 2.7 and Python 3.4+.
Yes, it would probably be better to hollow out __init__.py and just have it reexport stuff from the submodules, but that can't happen just yet.
There's nothing special about the dunders (they're just discouraged when writing your own module/function names); you should just be able to do
from .__init__ import my_function as local_name
python2 and python3 (uses the discouraged __import__):
from 1st level module (pkg.foo, pgk.bar, ...):
local_name = __import__("", globals(), locals(), [], 1)
from module in subpackage (pkg.subpkg.foo, ...):
local_name = __import__("", globals(), locals(), [], 2)
python3 only*:
From pkg.foo or pkg.bar:
import importlib
local_name = importlib.import_module("..", __name__)
From pkg.subpkg.baz:
import importlib
local_name = importlib.import_module("...", __name__)
*import_module on python2 tries load pkg. in this case, unfortunately.