[New-bugs-announce] [issue6448] imp.find_module() -- be explicity that 'path' must be a list

[Jordan Bettis]

New submission from Jordan Bettis <jordanb at hafdconsulting.com>:

Hi. I just spent a while fighting with imp.find_module because I was
trying to pass the path as a string, rather than a string embedded in a
list:

result = find_module('mod', '/path')

rather than

result = find_module('mod', ['/path'])

The issue is compounded by an incredibly unhelpful error message:

ImportError: No frozen submodule named /path.mod

Now the documentation *does* say that path should be a list, if you read
it carefully, so perhaps it was just my reading comprehension. But doing
a google search I found a discussion from 2006 along the same lines:

http://www.techlists.org/archives/programming/pythonlist/2006-01/msg01445.shtml

So I thought it might be good to clarify that a string will not work.
Perhaps the wording could be changed to something like this:


   Try to find the module *name* on the search path *path*.  The
   *path* argument is a list of directory names. Each directory is
   searched for files with any of the suffixes returned
   by :func:`get_suffixes` above.  Invalid names in the list are
   silently ignored (but all list items must be strings).  If
   *path* is omitted or ``None``, the list of directory names
   given by ``sys.path`` is searched, but first it searches a few
   special places: it tries to find a built-in module with the
   given name (:const:`C_BUILTIN`), then a frozen
   module (:const:`PY_FROZEN`), and on some systems some other
   places are looked in as well (on Windows, it looks in the
   registry which may point to a specific file).

I think what is confusing is the conditional about the type of 'path',
The possibilities are 'list' or 'not present' (or None) but when I read
it I think I saw the 'not present' option as being implicit, and the
conditional implying that it could be a string or a list of strings.
>From the discussion above it seems like the other person had the same
trouble, so removing the conditional should be enough to make it clear
that path *must* be a list if it exists.

----------
assignee: georg.brandl
components: Documentation
messages: 90333
nosy: georg.brandl, jordanb
severity: normal
status: open
title: imp.find_module() -- be explicity that 'path' must be a list
versions: Python 2.4, Python 2.5, Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.0, Python 3.1, Python 3.2

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue6448>
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