Import module with same package as existing one

Question

I have the following directory structure:

/some/dir
       ┣ mainmodule
       ┃    ┣ __init__.py
       ┃    ┗ module.py
       ┗ submodules
            ┣ __init__.py
            ┗ module
                ┣ __init__.py
                ┣ submodule_1.py
                ┣ ...
                ┗ submodule_n.py

Both /some/dir/mainmodule and /some/dir/submodules are not on pyhton's library path. Being located in directory /some/dir/mainmodule I want to import all modules ( module.submodule_1 , ..., module.submodule_n ) in directory /some/dir/submodules .

I tried the following. But I always get ImportError: No module named submodule_1 :

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.append("/some/dir/submodules")
>>> import module.submodule_1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named submodule_1
>>>

The problem seems to be that module.py in /some/dir/mainmodule has the same name as the first package of the modules in /some/dir/submodules . Renaiming module.py or the package solves this issues, but as this is some widely used legacy code I'm working on, I don't know if there are undocumented references to these names. Thus I'm looking for a way to solve this without renaming any files.

Answer 1

use the following line.

sys.path.insert(0, '/some/dir/submodules')