Question

I’m trying to get the argparse module working in Python. My problem is that on a fresh install, I get the following:

File "test.py", line 3, in <module>
import argparse
File "/home/jon/Pythons/realmine/argparse.py", line 3, in <module>
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Short sample app')
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'ArgumentParser'

test.py is:

import argparse

Clearly, I’m missing something. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Usually this symptom is the result of shadowing a builtin module with one of your own. And from the error message:

File "/home/jon/Pythons/realmine/argparse.py", line 3, in <module>

it looks like you have your own module argparse.py, which is causing the problem, because it’s the one which test.py is trying to import, and which lacks ArgumentParser. Rename your argparse.py to something else (and remove any .py[c/o] files).