beginner import confusion

[Scott David Daniels]

DilbertFan wrote:

> Hi,
>  I really thought that I had this importing business down.
> I recently downloaded and installed mx module for the DateTime class.
> 
> In IDLE, I go:
>    import mx
>    mx.DateTime.DateTime(2004)
 >    I get AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'DateTime'

mx is a package, mx.DateTime is a module; you need to import a module
to get to its contents.

>  but if you type:
>     import mx.DateTime
>     mx.DateTime.DateTime(2004)
>    <DateTime object for '2004-01-01 00:00:00.00' at a979e0>
 > If you "import mx", ... doesn't that get everything?
If mx were a module, you would be right.  However, it is a "package,"
a collection of modules and packages.  Packages are a way of keeping
the names one provider of many python modules from conflicting with
the module names of both you and python itself.

> If you know, from the docs, that it contains a DateTime class
> and then a DateTime object, 
mx.DateTime.DateTime is a class, not an object.
You could do:
     from mx.DateTime import DateTime
to simply get the DateTime class and then use DateTime(2004).

-- 
-Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org