import MySQLdb doesn't get cursors

[jmath222]

Anyone know why this happens? Cursors is in the __all__ in the __init__.py, so it should be available after import.

$ python
Python 3.8.8 (default, Aug 11 2021, 06:52:42)
[GCC 8.5.0 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-3)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import MySQLdb
MySQLdb.cursors
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
AttributeError: module 'MySQLdb' has no attribute 'cursors'

[methane]

Cursors is in the __all__ in the __init__.py, so it should be available after import.

You misunderstood __all__. It isn't automatic import.

[jmath222]

Understood. I see that using from MySQLdb import * would get cursors.

I don't want to suggest a change to the package, but want to explain why I brought this up. My organization experienced a difficult to debug import issue because we (and PyCharm) assumed import MySQLdb also imported MySQLdb.cursors

We had working module A, which only imported MySQLdb but used MySQLdb.cursors.
Module B imported MySQLdb.cursors, but no longer used it after a change.
Module A imported module B, which brought MySQLdb.cursors into the MySQLdb namespace in module A.

A developer was cleaning up module B and removed the MySQLdb.cursors import, as PyCharm correctly marked the import as unused. This broke module A, as cursors was no longer available in its MySQLdb namespace.

This doesn't sound like the fault of MySQLdb itself, maybe just an idiosyncrasy of python's import system/PyCharm. However I can't remember ever having an issue like this with another package so I wanted to point it out.