Question

So I downloaded and installed matplotlib. The weird things is that I can run the examples fine when they were placed in home/user/Desktop but when I moved them to home/user/Documents, they stopped working and I get the below message. Is there something special about the Documents folder that they prevent matplotlib from importing?

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "contour_manual.py", line 4, in <module>
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/pyplot.py", line 23, in <module>
    from matplotlib.figure import Figure, figaspect
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/figure.py", line 18, in <module>
    from axes import Axes, SubplotBase, subplot_class_factory
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/axes.py", line 8454, in <module>
    Subplot = subplot_class_factory()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/axes.py", line 8446, in subplot_class_factory
    new_class = new.classobj("%sSubplot" % (axes_class.__name__),
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'classobj'

Answer 1

Do you have a file new.py in your Documents folder, by any chance? If you have, try renaming it to something else.

The matplotlib module axes.py imports new, and if you have a file new.py lying around in your Documents folder, that will cause Python to load it instead of the built-in new module.