Importing from builtin library when module with same name exists

Actually, solving this is rather easy, but the implementation will always be a bit fragile, because it depends python import mechanism's internals and they are subject to change in future versions.

(the following code shows how to load both local and non-local modules and how they may coexist)

def import_non_local(name, custom_name=None):
    import imp, sys

    custom_name = custom_name or name

    f, pathname, desc = imp.find_module(name, sys.path[1:])
    module = imp.load_module(custom_name, f, pathname, desc)
    f.close()

    return module

# Import non-local module, use a custom name to differentiate it from local
# This name is only used internally for identifying the module. We decide
# the name in the local scope by assigning it to the variable calendar.
calendar = import_non_local('calendar','std_calendar')

# import local module normally, as calendar_local
import calendar as calendar_local

print calendar.Calendar
print calendar_local

The best solution, if possible, is to avoid naming your modules with the same name as standard-library or built-in module names.

Changing the name of your module is not necessary. Rather, you can use absolute_import to change the importing behavior. For example with stem/socket.py I import the socket module as follows:

from __future__ import absolute_import
import socket

This only works with Python 2.5 and above; it's enabling behavior that is the default in Python 3.0 and higher. Pylint will complain about the code but it's perfectly valid.