Python 2 and 3 compatible way to call intern()

Question

How do I write code that uses Python's intern that will work (be compatible) with both Python 2 and Python 3? Is there a clean way to do it?

In Python 2, intern is a builtin, so you use intern(). In Python 3, it has been moved to the sys module, so you're supposed to use sys.intern(). It seems that intern() works on Python 2 but not Python 3, and sys.intern() works on Python 3 but not Python 2. Is there any clean syntax that will work on both Python 2 and Python 3, without using version detection (ugly)?

Answer 1

try:
    from sys import intern
except ImportError:
    pass

This should work on both.

With six package:

from six.moves import intern