"AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute" - Can someone explain the meaning of this error message?

Question

I'm trying to get the ODB library working. In the documentation at https://python-obd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ it lists the following code:

import obd

connection = obd.OBD("/dev/ttyUSB0") # connects to USB or RF port

cmd = obd.commands.SPEED # select an OBD command (sensor)

response = connection.query(cmd) # send the command, and parse the response

print(response.value) # returns unit-bearing values thanks to Pint
print(response.value.to("mph")) # user-friendly unit conversions

When I put this in a file called test.py and I run it:

python2 test.py

I get the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 1, in <module>
    import obd
  File "/home/ubuntu/obd.py", line 3, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'OBD'

Stackoverflow comes up with several iterations of this error message, but none clearly explain the problem, only giving specific solutions to those libraries.

I guess it's obvious that I'm new to Python, and I'm having trouble interpreting this error message, even after several hours of writing several small Python programs. I am of course also interested in why the error message is so un-intuitive to a newcomer and where I can gain the common knowledge I might be missing, and I guess this is as good a case to discover that through as any.

Answer 1

So far I have figured out the following:

<module> refers to the name of my python script that I am trying to run.

The mistake I made at first, was to name my test.py file, initially obd.py . This conflicted with the import obd as it was trying to import the file itself - even after I deleted it, The reason was that when I tried to run it the first time, it created a file called obd.pyc - and even though obd.py was no longer there, import OBD found the initially created obd.pyc and tried to import that - which of course does not contain the OBD object from the library I was trying to use.

This is not the detailed answer I'm looking for, so please add a more detailed explanation - or a link to how Python compiling works, if you can.