Where is 'pyximport'?

Question

I have some (not so) old code in which I use pyximport, but the code fails right at

import pyximport; pyximport.install()

with

ImportError: No module named pyximport

I've made a few changes to my system since I last ran this code, so perhaps it was removed or not migrated; but I can't find this package anywhere and

pip search pyximport

yields no results.

What happened to pyximport? Where can I find it and, failing that, what should I use instead?

score 32 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 19 '15 at 19:25

32

pyximport is a part of cython.

$ pip install cython

You can find the description of it here. In short, pyximport provides an import hook which allows you to import cython files (and compile them) as though they were python.

answered Oct 19 '15 at 19:25

Andrew Walker

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I have Cython (0.23.4), so I wonder why `pyximport` is not found. – orome Oct 19 '15 at 19:27
pyximport appears to work under cython latest (0.23.4) – Andrew Walker Oct 19 '15 at 19:29
1

Any thoughts on what could be going on then? If I `pip install -U --force-reinstall Cython` I still get a module not found error from `import pyximport`. – orome Oct 19 '15 at 19:33
Is your copy of pip writing to the correct virtual environment / condo install? (Can you see it in site-packages) – Andrew Walker Oct 19 '15 at 19:39
Also - do you have an appropriate compiler on your system path? This one is doubtful, but you'll need to double check it going forward – Andrew Walker Oct 19 '15 at 19:41
Also, on Linux, do you have the python headers installed? – Andrew Walker Oct 19 '15 at 19:41
Cython right there in `/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages`. In fact `pyximport` is right there too. – orome Oct 19 '15 at 19:42
Would the absence of headers give a "no module named" error? – orome Oct 19 '15 at 20:26

Where is 'pyximport'?

1 Answers1