[Python-Dev] elementtree in stdlib (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Thu Apr 6 21:35:21 CEST 2006

Trent Mick wrote:

That is the current state.

which reminds that maybe it's time to add an import helper to the standard library, so you can do

stringio = import_search("cStringIO", "StringIO")
ET = import_search("lxml.etree", "cElementTree", "xml.etree.cElementTree")
db = import_search("superdb", "sqlite3", "fancydb", "dumbdb")

etc. without having to type in

for mod in ("cStringIO", "StringIO"):
    try:
        m = __import__(mod)
        for p in mod.split(".")[1:]:
            m = getattr(m, p, None)
            if m is None:
                raise ImportError
        return m
    except ImportError:
        pass
else:
    raise ImportError(mod)

all the time (or create those horridly nested try-except constructs).

or perhaps

try:
    import cStringIO as stringio
retry ImportError:
    import StringIO as stringio
except ImportError:
    print "didn't work!"

would be a solution (sorry, wrong list).

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