How to import module when module name has a '-' dash or hyphen in it?

Become part of the top 3% of the developers by applying to Toptal https://topt.al/25cXVn

--

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Puzzle Game 2 Looping

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
00:32 Accepted answer (Score 147)
01:21 Answer 2 (Score 219)
01:38 Answer 3 (Score 138)
02:05 Answer 4 (Score 54)
02:23 Thank you

--

Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8350...

Accepted answer links:
[Julien's answer]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53516983/429...

Answer 2 links:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/import...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#python #import #module

#avk47

ANSWER 1

Score 252

Starting from Python 3.1, you can use importlib :

import importlib  
foobar = importlib.import_module("foo-bar")

( https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.html )

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 149

In Python 2, you can't. foo-bar is not an identifier. rename the file to foo_bar.py

It's possible since Python 3.1+, see Julien's answer.

If import is not your goal (as in: you don't care what happens with sys.modules, you don't need it to import itself), just getting all of the file's globals into your own scope, you can use execfile

# contents of foo-bar.py
baz = 'quux'

>>> execfile('foo-bar.py')
>>> baz
'quux'
>>>

ANSWER 3

Score 141

Solution: If you can't rename the module to match Python naming conventions, create a new module to act as an intermediary:

New module foo_proxy.py:

 tmp = __import__('foo-bar')
 globals().update(vars(tmp))

Module doing the import main.py:

 from foo_proxy import *

ANSWER 4

Score 57

If you can't rename the original file, you could also use a symlink:

ln -s foo-bar.py foo_bar.py

Then you can just do:

from foo_bar import *