相同的笔记本无法导入模块

Question

I have two identical Jupyter Notebooks in two different folders. If I fire up jupyter notebooks and open one of the notebooks, and run the cell with:

import example_name

it loads just fine.

If I open the identical notebook in the other folder and try running the same:

import example_name

I get error message:

ImportError: No module named example_name

What could explain this and how do I track down the filepath to 'example_name' in the notebook where it loads fine?

Answer 1

You're trying to import a module named example_name from the directory in which the notebook resides ./ - the module - a file called example_name.py - exists in one of the directories but not the other.

The issue is related python sys.path which tells the python interpreter where to load python modules from, you can print this list of directories and you should see an entry for . - which is the current directory and a bunch of other directories.

You can either copy the example_name.py file along with the notebook or add the directory path of example_name.py to sys.path using sys.path.append('/some/path') .

To do this correctly you would actually have a directory on your computer which contains all the scripts you need in your notebooks, and add that directory path to the PYTHONPATH environment variable. That way the directory will always be added to sys.path .