Discussion on: Dead Simple Python: Project Structure and Imports

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Replies for: Hi! Firstly great article. This has been one of the clearest examples of how it should be done. Thanks. I am not sure whether this is an edge ca...

I also have one more question - if I wanted to include an ini/configuration file in a resources folder, how would I import it?

Thanks

Jason C. McDonald • Sep 24 '19 • Edited

I like to put all such non-code files in a project subdirectory (not a package) called resources, and then use the built-in package pkg_resources to access it.

For example, in my omission project, the module omission/game/content_loader.py needs to load the text file omission/resources/content/content.txt. I do that with...

import pkg_resources

class ContentLoader(object):

    def __init__(self):
        """
        Open the file and load the contents in.
        """

        # ...

        path = pkg_resources.resource_filename(
            __name__,
            os.path.join(os.pardir, 'resources', 'content', 'content.txt')
        )

        with open(path, 'rt', encoding='utf-8') as content_file:
            raw_content = content_file.read()

        # ...

Simple as that!

P.S. If you find yourself needing to access files outside of your project directory, say, in the user's home directory, I recommend the package appdirs.

Ashley Hoff • Sep 24 '19

Again, thanks for the reply.

I've had a play with this one. Considering I am dealing with an ini file, it appears that configparser does what I want. This is the snippet I've come up with:

def conf():
    config = configparser.ConfigParser(converters={'list': lambda x: [i.strip() for i in x.split(',')]},
                                       allow_no_value=True)
    config.read('generateandsend/Resources/generateandsend.ini')
    section = config['test']
    string_a = section.get('StringA', None)
    string_b = section.get('StringB', None)

    return string_a, string_b

Is hard coding the relative path in that way frowned apon?

Jason C. McDonald • Sep 24 '19 • Edited

Is hard coding the relative path in that way frowned apon?

Most certainly, especially because you have to account for differences in path format between operating systems.

I'd recommend incorporating pkg_resources into your approach above.

def conf():
    config = configparser.ConfigParser(converters={'list': lambda x: [i.strip() for i in x.split(',')]},
                                       allow_no_value=True)
    path = pkg_resources.resource_filename(
            __name__,
            os.path.join(os.pardir, 'Resources', 'generateandsend.ini')
        )
    config.read(path)
    section = config['test']
    string_a = section.get('StringA', None)
    string_b = section.get('StringB', None)

    return string_a, string_b

I believe that will work? You'll have to check how config.read() handles an absolute path.

Ashley Hoff • Sep 24 '19

Beautiful. Thanks. I had to massage it a little and remove os.pardir, as it was giving me a false directory on my windows machine (C:\tmp\generateandsend\..\Resources\generateandsend.ini).

The resultant path variable now looks like:

path = pkg_resources.resource_filename(__name__, os.path.join('Resources', 'dummy.ini'))

I just need to test this on my Linux box

Cheers again. Send the bill to...... 😉