You could use the ResourceManager API from setuptools
' pkg_resources
:
import pkg_resources
my_stream = pkg_resources.resource_stream(__name__, "foo.dat")
will open my.package/my/package/foo.dat
as the file-like object my_stream
for example.
This will work for regular as well as zipped eggs. Note however that this requires setuptools
to be installed. For a solution that only uses the standard library (which is to be preferred), see @abarnert's answer.