importing a python custom package with hyphen

Question

I am looking for a way to import custom python package which has a hyphen in its name. I thought hyphen is not an recommended approach but since its a shared project I do not have control over it.

Think here is, I wanted to add a bash script which checks after installing all packages that the installation is successful.

I am able to verify it using:

<PYTHON_VERSION> -c "import <PACKAGE_NAME>" &> /dev/null
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "Failed"
fi

I see that I am able to install this custom package successfully, since I checked in the virtual environment using:

>>> import pkg_resources
installed_packages = pkg_resources.working_set
installed_packages_list = sorted(["%s==%s" % (i.key, i.version)
   for i in installed_packages])
print(installed_packages_list)

And also did a pip freeze to see installed packages.

However while importing I see error such as:

>>> import build-config
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    import build-config
                ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

>>> import build_config
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'build_config'

Any pointers please?

Answer 1

You can use the importlib module.

Import using the importlib.import_module(name, package=None) function like this

import importlib
module_name = importlib.import_module('module-name')

Then use module_name to access it.