How to import module when module name has a '-' dash or hyphen in it?

Question

I want to import foo-bar.py. This works:

foobar = __import__(\"foo-bar\")

This does not:

from \"foo-bar\" import *
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Answer 1

If you can't rename the original file, you could also use a symlink:

ln -s foo-bar.py foo_bar.py

Then you can just:

from foo_bar import *

Answer 2

Like other said you can't use the "-" in python naming, there are many workarounds, one such workaround which would be useful if you had to add multiple modules from a path is using sys.path

For example if your structure is like this:

foo-bar
├── barfoo.py
└── __init__.py

import sys
sys.path.append('foo-bar')

import barfoo

Answer 3

Starting from Python 3.1, you can use importlib :

import importlib  
foobar = importlib.import_module("foo-bar")

( https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.html )

Answer 4

you can't. foo-bar is not an identifier. rename the file to foo_bar.py

Edit: If import is not your goal (as in: you don't care what happens with sys.modules, you don't need it to import itself), just getting all of the file's globals into your own scope, you can use execfile

# contents of foo-bar.py
baz = 'quux'

>>> execfile('foo-bar.py')
>>> baz
'quux'
>>> 

Answer 5

If you can't rename the module to match Python naming conventions, create a new module to act as an intermediary:

 ---- foo_proxy.py ----
 tmp = __import__('foo-bar')
 globals().update(vars(tmp))

 ---- main.py ----
 from foo_proxy import *