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6.4.2 Intra-package References

The submodules often need to refer to each other. For example, the ‘surround’ module might use the ‘echo’ module. In fact, such references are so common that the import statement first looks in the containing package before looking in the standard module search path. Thus, the ‘surround’ module can simply use import echo or from echo import echofilter. If the imported module is not found in the current package (the package of which the current module is a submodule), the import statement looks for a top-level module with the given name.

When packages are structured into subpackages (as with the ‘Sound’ package in the example), there's no shortcut to refer to submodules of sibling packages--the full name of the subpackage must be used. For example, if the module ‘Sound.Filters.vocoder’ needs to use the ‘echo’ module in the ‘Sound.Effects’ package, it can use from Sound.Effects import echo.

Starting with Python 2.5, in addition to the implicit relative imports described above, you can write explicit relative imports with the from module import name form of import statement. These explicit relative imports use leading dots to indicate the current and parent packages involved in the relative import. From the ‘surround’ module for example, you might use:

    from . import echo
    from .. import Formats
    from ..Filters import equalizer

Note that both explicit and implicit relative imports are based on the name of the current module. Since the name of the main module is always "__main__", modules intended for use as the main module of a Python application should always use absolute imports.