How do I use data in package_data from source code?
The standard pkgutil module's get_data()
function will calculate the path to your data, relative to your package, and retrieve the data for you via whatever module loader Python used to import the hermes
package:
import pkgutildata = pkgutil.get_data('hermes', 'templates/python.tpl')
Of course in certain cases you could just read your data using a path calculated from hermes.__file__
, but if you plan to distribute your project, consider that it may be installed in different ways on the end user's machine: as plain files, deployed in a zipped egg archive, etc. In the latter case, your hermes
module will have been imported by Python using a zipimporter
, preventing you from doing a normal open(path).read()
:
>>> import hermes>>> hermes.__loader__<zipimporter object "/home/pat/.cascade/virt/foo/lib/python2.6/site-packages/foo-0.0.0-py2.6.egg">
If you're okay with adding a runtime dependency on the distribute
codebase, you may want to consdider looking at the pkg_resources module
, which can give you the same result but adds other capabilities.
import pkg_resourcesdata = pkg_resources.resource_string('hermes', 'templates/python.tpl')