Question

Lets say you’re in a file called logging.py. If you try to import the standard logging module, you’ll end up importing the file you’re in. How can you import the standard logging module from here?

Answer 1

The answer from samy.vilar gives lots of useful options. But if you’re looking for the simplest and most direct answer:

import imp
import sys

f, pathname, desc = imp.find_module('logging', sys.path[1:])
logging = imp.load_module('logging', f, pathname, desc)

A few things to note here:

The load_module call is more like reload(logging) than import logging in that it won’t bind the name logging in the local scope, but will replace any existing module under the name logging. So, if you’ve done an import logging before this, that name now refers to the new module, not the old one; if you hadn’t, the name logging isn’t bound in your scope. (That’s why the logging = is there above, to put it into scope.)

I don’t know if it’s actually guaranteed that the ” that puts the current directory into the module path is actually the first entry in sys.path. For that matter, it’s always possible to insert ”, or for that matter ‘.’, into sys.path yourself. So, if you want to be paranoid you could do something like this:

f, pathname, desc = imp.find_module('logging', [path for path in sys.path if path and path[0] != '.'])

Or you could get even more paranoid, e.g., compare abspath(path) to sys.argv[0] and os.getcwd() in various ways to make sure nobody is sneakily forcing you to re-import yourself. It depends on what your goals are.