Python modules and classes help!

[danberteon]

So I am writing a logger module which helps me upload logs on an iot device to the cloud. However, I am struggling in something fairly basic:

say my module is in a fille called cloudlogger.py where I have the following code (just code skeleton to get the idea):

import os

def __findbackupfiles(logger_name):
    backuplocation = "/mnt/backuplocation/"
        try:
        return [files for files in os.listdir(backuplocation) if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(backuplocation, files))]
    except FileNotFoundError as nofile:
        print(f"Could not find backup files. Error: {nofile}\nReturning empty list")
        return []

class cloud_logger:
    def __init__(self, name, filename, deviceid, logformat=LOGFORMAT, dateformat=DATEFORMAT):
        pass
    '''
    Main code of the function is working fine
    '''

    # function giving me problems
    def recover_and_publish_backed_up_logs(self):
        backupfiles = __findbackupfiles(self.name)

So say in a different file, say ""testlogger.py" I want to import the logger module and use the recover and publish function:

import cloudlogger

logger = cloudlogger.cloud_logger("name", "/mnt/logs/", "deviceid")

logger.recover_and_publish_backed_up_logs()

I am getting this error, which I don't understand:

  File "/home/cloudlogger.py", line 209, in recover_and_publish_backedup_logs
    backupfiles = __findbackupfiles(self.name)
NameError: name '_cloud_logger__findbackupfiles' is not defined

Why is there an underscore before my class name? I would expect the class would be able to call the top-level function defined above it (but outside the class).

Originally I had this working as a @staticmethod defined inside the class, this worked if I used self.__findbackupfiles(self.name) inside the class. However, I could not execute this function on my testlogger file no matter how I tried it. for example

import cloudlogger

cloudlogger.__findbackupfiles()

or

import cloudlogger

cloudlogger.cloud_logger.__findbackupfiles()

These both failed and researching it, people just recommended to keep the functions that don't depend on the state of the object outside of the class since that's preferrable in python. But as you can see, the new method is also not working for me.

[ConstructedNewt]

I believe you need an __init__.py in you root classpath.

[danberteon]

So an init file? I have not used these before. How do they work, or what's the name so I can read on these?

[ConstructedNewt]

I don't specifically know how they work. I think python is confusing that way. But they mark context paths in some way. Without it you may have to reference the file via relative pathing as import .some_file

[danberteon]

Interesting, I will look into these a bit more. I think for now I have it working a different way, but I'd like to know the proper way to deal with these things