Question

Sorry, if this question has been asked before. I’ve looked around for quite a while and I haven’t found a solution.

So I’ve created a class in the file ResourceOpen.py

class ResourceOpen():

    import urllib.request

    def __init__(self, source):
            try:
                # Try to open URL
                page = urllib.request.urlopen(source)
                self.text = page.read().decode("utf8")
            except ValueError:
                # Fail? Print error.
                print ("Woops!  Can't find the URL.")
                self.text = ''

    def getText(self):
        return self.text

I would like to use this class in another program,youTubeCommentReader.py…

import ResourceOpen
import urllib.request

pageToOpen = "http://www.youtube.com"
resource = ResourceOpen.ResourceOpen(pageToOpen)
text = resource.getText()

Whenever I try and run youTubeCommentReader, I get the error:

Traceback               
    <module>    D:\myPythonProgs\youTubeCommentReader.py
    __init__    D:\myPythonProgs\ResourceOpen.py
NameError: global name 'urllib' is not defined

What am I doing wrong? Also, I should note that ResourceOpen.py works fine when I access the class within the same file.

Answer 1

Don’t import on the class level, just do:

import urllib.request

class ResourceOpen():    

    def __init__(self, source):
            try:
                # Try to open URL
                page = urllib.request.urlopen(source)
                self.text = page.read().decode("utf8")
            except ValueError:
                # Fail? Print error.
                print ("Woops!  Can't find the URL.")
                self.text = ''

    def getText(self):
        return self.text

In the other script:

import ResourceOpen
s = ResourceOpen.ResourceOpen('http://google.com')
print(s.getText())

In your case the module is imported just fine, but only added to the classes namespace. You always want imports on the global level.