Question

I am teaching myself python from this site. On Chapter 3, when I typed the code in the given example, I got the following error–

Python 3.2 (r32:88445, Mar 25 2011, 19:28:28) 
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import turtle
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "turtle.py", line 2, in <module>
    wn = turtle.Screen()
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'Screen'
>>> 

Is this something that I need to download and install? I tried looking into docs.python.org, but my nose started to bleed reading all that tech stuff.
Kindly point me in the right direction please? Thank you.

Answer 1

Adam Bernier’s answer is probably correct. It looks like you have a file called turtle.py that Python is picking up before the one that came with your Python installation.

To track down these problems:

% python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jan 29 2011, 13:30:16) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
[...] # Your ${PYTHONPATH}
>>> import turtle
>>> turtle.__file__
'/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk/turtle.pyc' # Should be under your Python installation.
>>> 

If you see something like this:

>>> import turtle
>>> turtle.__file__
'turtle.py'

Then you’ll want to move turtle.py (and any corresponding turtle.pyc or turtle.pyo files) in your current working directory out of the way.

As per the comments below, you’ll find a wealth of information about a module, including its pathname and contents by calling help() upon it. For example:

>>> import turtle
>>> help(turtle)