Difference between a module and a package

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Modules

A module is a single Python file that can be imported. Using a module looks like this:

module.py

def hi():
    print("Hello world!")

my_script.py

import module
module.hi()

in an interpreter

>>> from module import hi
>>> hi()
# Hello world!

Packages

A package is made up of multiple Python files (or modules), and can even include libraries written in C or C++. Instead of being a single file, it is an entire folder structure which might look like this:

Folder package

__init__.py

from package.dog import woof
from package.hi import hi

dog.py

def woof():
    print("WOOF!!!")

hi.py

def hi():
    print("Hello world!")

All Python packages must contain an __init__.py file. When you import a package in your script (import package), the __init__.py script will be run, giving you access to the all of the functions in the package. In this case, it allows you to use the package.hi and package.woof functions.

Putting package in .zip

It is possible to put a Python package in a ZIP file, and use it that way if you add these lines to the beginning of your script:

import sys
sys.path.append("package.zip")

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Difference between a module and a package:

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
94 Difference between a module and a package
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve