Syntax error on import statement

[mattrweaver]

Windows 10 user. Python 3.6. I used the pip install and it was successful.

I get a syntax error on:

import wos-journals-client-py

because of the dashes in the package name.

[caifand]

Windows 10 user. Python 3.7. Successfully pip installed the client.

I get the same error as @mattrweaver had:

@maloku Thanks for your work! Looking forward to using the client.

[AMRacca]

Hello. Getting the same error on MacOS. Python 3.10. Any news?

[gneissone]

@AMRacca
Not an ideal solution, but you could try a find and replace throughout the package to remove the dashes.
On the command line, cd to the location of your local wos-journals-client-api package. Then find and replace with something like:
sed -i '.bak' 's/wos-journals-client-py/wos_journals_client_py/g' *.py

This worked for me on macOs.

[BernardCooke]

Hi - I've just tried this out and have some help which doesn't need changes to the package name. Having zero hyphens hurts readability in my opinion but also I think this will help anyone else with this issue!

EDIT: so I wanted to leave this comment as I think merging #2 might not be an optimal solution to the problem as it'll be a huge breaking change for downstream consumers. I have a vested interest as some of my colleagues are currently using this library and would have to re-work a lot of their code if the package name was changed. It's not my call but I'd like to offer a less disruptive alternative.

Looking at setup.py, that's the name which you'll need to pip install if the package goes onto PyPI. But it's not what you need to use to import in a Python script, notebook etc.

The docs for Python here on Identifiers state:

Within the ASCII range (U+0001..U+007F), the valid characters for identifiers are the same as in Python 2.x: the uppercase and lowercase letters A through Z, the underscore _ and, except for the first character, the digits 0 through 9.

So when you try to import wos-journals-client-py it will fail as identifiers aren't allowed to contain a "-".

When you want to import a new package, Python commonly takes the folder structure and replaces "-" with "_" in folder names. It also lets you look for sub-modules with "attribute access", i.e. to access the code in the folder clarivate/wos_journals you should run import clarivate.wos_journals.

To get to the client package, that means you should run import clarivate.wos_journals.client as client.

I'm on Windows 10/Python 10 but this should work for every Python version. For demonstration/testing I used venv to create a simple isolated environment - it's builtin with Python so nothing extra to install. If you're using something like Conda then there'll be a similar process for a Conda environment.

I have run the following commands (Bash):

### Optional if doing more than just testing
# Setup a working area
mkdir -p ~/temp/wos_journals && cd ~/temp/wos_journals

# Virtual env for testing
python -m venv virtualenv && source virtualenv/Scripts/activate
### End of optional

git clone git@github.com:clarivate/wosjournals-python-client.git
cd wosjournals-python-client
python -m pip wheel .
python -m pip install dist/*.whl

This builds a wheel from the code here and installs in your virtual environment (if you set one up). I can then run Python (python) and interact like so:

>>> import clarivate.wos_journals.client as client
>>> print(dir(client))
['ApiAttributeError', 'ApiClient', 'ApiException', 'ApiKeyError', 'ApiTypeError', 'ApiValueError', 'Configuration', 'OpenApiException', '__builtins__', '__cached__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__path__', '__spec__', '__version__', 'api_client', 'configuration', 'exceptions', 'model_utils', 'rest']

If you want to run a script you can still do python <scriptname>.py as long as you're still in the same environment.

Hope this helps a bit! 🙂