Relative imports in Python

Question

Hey all -- I am pulling my hair out with relative imports in Python. I've read the documentation 30 times and numerous posts here on SO and other forums -- still doesn't seem to work.

My directory structure currently looks like this

src/
    __init__.py
    main.py
    components/
        __init__.py
        expander.py
        language_id.py
    utilities/
        __init__.py
        functions.py

I want expander.py and language_id.py to have access to the functions module. I run python main.py which accesses the modules just fine with from components.expander import * and components.language_id import *.

However, the code inside expander and language_id to access the functions module:

from ..utilities.functions import *

I receive this error:

ValueError: Attempted relative import beyond toplevel package

I have gone over it a bunch of times and it seems to follow the documentation. Anyone have any ideas of what's going wrong here?

Answer 1

Nevermind, I solved it:

src/
    main.py
    mod/
        __init__.py
        components/
            __init__.py
            expander.py
            language_id.py
        utilities/
            __init__.py
            functions.py

main.py then refers to the subpackages as:

from mod.components.expander import *
from mod.utilities.functions import *

expander.py and language_id.py have access to functions.py with:

from ..utilities.functions import *

But the interesting thing is that I had a text file inside the components directory that expander.py uses. However, at runtime it couldn't locate the file even though it was in the same directory. I moved the text file to the same directory as main.py and it worked. Seems counter-intuitive.