Importing from a Package in IDLE vs Shell

Question

Importing a whole package works in IDLE, but not in shell. The following works fine in IDLE:

import tkinter as tk
tk.filedialog.askopenfilename()

In shell, I get this error:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'filedialog'

I understand that I have to import tkinter.filedialog to make this work in shell.

Why the difference between IDLE and shell? How can I make IDLE act like shell? It can be frustrating to have a script working in IDLE, and failing in shell.

I am using Python 3.4.

Answer 1

This is an IDLE bug which I fixed for future 3.5.3 and 3.6.0a4 releases. Tracker issue.

For an existing 3.5 or 3.4 release, add the following to idlelib/run.py just before the LOCALHOST line.

for mod in ('simpledialog', 'messagebox', 'font',
            'dialog', 'filedialog', 'commondialog',
            'colorchooser'):
    delattr(tkinter, mod)
    del sys.modules['tkinter.' + mod]

I presume that this will work with earlier 3.x releases, but do not have them installed to test. For existing 3.6.0a_ releases, replace 'colorchooser' with 'ttk'.