Importing BitTorrent bencode module

Question

Hi,

I'm on Mac OS X 10.6. Python is 2.6.1. I've installed bencode module as

sudo easy_install BitTorrent-bencode

It appeared in site-packages

/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg

But, how to import and use this module?

>>> import bencode

doesn't work...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named bencode

How to import modules from site-packages? How to recognize module name BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg contains?

sys.path ['', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python26.zip', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-darwin', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-tk', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-old', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/PyObjC', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/wx-2.8-mac-unicode']

Thanks

Answer 1

The way to do it is to add the .egg to sys.path. The easiest way to do that is to drop a .pth file into site-packages/ containing the filename of the egg:

BitTorrent_bencode.pth:

BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg

If it still doesn't import properly at this point then you may have the module or package name wrong. Open the .egg file in something that can open .zip files and examine the internal structure for hints.

Answer 2

From what i see, BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.4.egg on pypi does not containt bencode.py.
I would download sources and manually copy bencode.py and BTL.py in your site-packages folder.

Answer 3

The BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.4.egg is broken. If you use unzip to look at the contents of the egg you'll see:

$ unzip BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
Archive:  BitTorrent_bencode-5.0.8-py2.6.egg
  inflating: EGG-INFO/dependency_links.txt  
  inflating: EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO       
  inflating: EGG-INFO/SOURCES.txt    
  inflating: EGG-INFO/top_level.txt  
  inflating: EGG-INFO/zip-safe       
  inflating: test/__init__.py        
  inflating: test/__init__.pyc       
  inflating: test/benchmarkbencode.py  
  inflating: test/benchmarkbencode.pyc  
  inflating: test/benchmarkdata.py   
  inflating: test/benchmarkdata.pyc  
  inflating: test/testbencode.py     
  inflating: test/testbencode.pyc    

Notice that bencode.py and BTL.py are not included. If you download the source distribution for the package from pypi, you can get the missing files. The problem with the package is that the setup.py does not include the root directory of the distribution in the list of packages that the egg is created by. To fix this you could edit setup.py and replace the line that says:

     packages = find_packages(),

with:

     packages = ['','test'],

Then, running python setup.py install will correctly install the package.

Answer 4

You can alternatively use the bzrlib.bencode package. This installs with easy_install or pip.