IniReader | A ini configuration file parser for nodejs | Parser library

It might be helpful to take a step back for a brief moment and look at the fundamental issue that you seem to be faced with, namely: "How do I deal with missing python packages on users' machines?"

Basically there are two categories of solutions to this problem:

1. Help to make the missing packages available on the user's machine.
   • You could distribute your code as a package that users can install with pip. Just include dependency specifications in your distributed package, and pip will offer users to automatically download and install any missing packages.
   • You could freeze your code, i.e. convert your code to a self-standing application that already includes all the required packages.
2. Divide your package dependencies into mandatory and optional ones, and adapt your code such that the absence of an optional package doesn't cause all of the code to break.
   • As you already noted, you could sanitize the module-level imports (i.e. imports in __init__.py files) such that optional packages are not loaded 'prematurely'. In your case that would mean removing the DatReader imports.
   • As you also already noted, you could move optional package imports inside the classes or functions that need them. Style-wise this is not really optimal, but the code itself will still be perfectly valid. It normally doesn't matter that the import statements will get executed again every time when the function is run, because the actual import will still only take place once.
   • You could wrap the imports of the optional packages into try-except clauses. This will prevent any import errors from occurring (though of course you'll still encounter an error once you try to run a class or function that depends upon the missing package).

Example of an import in try-except clause:

std::unordered_map compares the keys using ==, so it's checking whether your char pointers point to the same memory location, not that they point to equal strings.

If you want std::unordered_map to compare the strings that the char pointers point to, you need to pass the map a custom comparator as a template parameter. Or do it the easy way and use std::string as the key type.