New submission from Jordan Bettis <jord...@hafdconsulting.com>:
Hi. I just spent a while fighting with imp.find_module because I was
trying to pass the path as a string, rather than a string embedded in a
list:
result = find_module('mod', '/path')
rather than
result = find_module('mod', ['/path'])
The issue is compounded by an incredibly unhelpful error message:
ImportError: No frozen submodule named /path.mod
Now the documentation *does* say that path should be a list, if you read
it carefully, so perhaps it was just my reading comprehension. But doing
a google search I found a discussion from 2006 along the same lines:
http://www.techlists.org/archives/programming/pythonlist/2006-01/msg01445.shtml
So I thought it might be good to clarify that a string will not work.
Perhaps the wording could be changed to something like this:
Try to find the module *name* on the search path *path*. The
*path* argument is a list of directory names. Each directory is
searched for files with any of the suffixes returned
by :func:`get_suffixes` above. Invalid names in the list are
silently ignored (but all list items must be strings). If
*path* is omitted or ``None``, the list of directory names
given by ``sys.path`` is searched, but first it searches a few
special places: it tries to find a built-in module with the
given name (:const:`C_BUILTIN`), then a frozen
module (:const:`PY_FROZEN`), and on some systems some other
places are looked in as well (on Windows, it looks in the
registry which may point to a specific file).
I think what is confusing is the conditional about the type of 'path',
The possibilities are 'list' or 'not present' (or None) but when I read
it I think I saw the 'not present' option as being implicit, and the
conditional implying that it could be a string or a list of strings.
>From the discussion above it seems like the other person had the same
trouble, so removing the conditional should be enough to make it clear
that path *must* be a list if it exists.
----------
assignee: georg.brandl
components: Documentation
messages: 90333
nosy: georg.brandl, jordanb
severity: normal
status: open
title: imp.find_module() -- be explicity that 'path' must be a list
versions: Python 2.4, Python 2.5, Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.0, Python
3.1, Python 3.2
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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue6448>
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