Running squad_to_dpr.py causes an error AttributeError: partially initialized module 'requests' has no attribute 'Response' (most likely due to a circular import)

[nhadziosma1]

I am trying to run the command:

python /home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/bin/python3/site-packages/haystack/utils/squad_to_dpr.py --squad_input_filename "path_to_my_input_data" --dpr_output_filename "path_where_data_would_be_saved"

in order to convert the format of my data into the format which is required by DPR. Unfortunately, I am getting the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/haystack/utils/squad_to_dpr.py", line 70, in <module>
    from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/elasticsearch/__init__.py", line 36, in <module>
    from .client import Elasticsearch
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/elasticsearch/client/__init__.py", line 23, in <module>
    from ..transport import Transport, TransportError
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/elasticsearch/transport.py", line 26, in <module>
    from .connection import Urllib3HttpConnection
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/elasticsearch/connection/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    from .http_requests import RequestsHttpConnection
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/elasticsearch/connection/http_requests.py", line 32, in <module>
    import requests
  File "/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/haystack/utils/requests.py", line 11, in <module>
    def request_with_retry(attempts: int = 3, status_codes: Optional[List[int]] = None, **kwargs) -> requests.Response:
AttributeError: partially initialized module 'requests' has no attribute 'Response' (most likely due to a circular import)

When I run the command print(sys.modules["haystack.utils.requests"]), I get as output:
<module 'haystack.utils.requests' from '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/haystack/utils/requests.py'>

When I run the command print(sys.modules["requests.models"]), I get as output:
<module 'requests.models' from '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/requests/models.py'>

I think that the problem is caused by the fact that inside the module haystack/utils/requests.py there is an import-statement, the import requests statement which should be importing a totally different package that is also called requests, but it imports itself (if that is even possible). The reason why I think that this is the case is because the package requests has a module called models.py, and in requests/models.py (which you can find on the following link: https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/ec78348c4b6292b1a38008fa31e51f7b6b2252dc/requests/models.py#L641) the Response class is implemented (which is mentioned in the error message).

Probably a very important piece of information is that when I display the content of sys.path, I get the following output:

['/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ray/thirdparty_files',
 '/home/my_user',
 '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python39.zip',
 '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9',
 '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/lib-dynload',
 '',
 '/home/my_user/.conda/envs/conda_env_py39/lib/python3.9/site-packages']

I guess that the executed import-statement (i.e. the line import requests from module haystack/utils/requests.py) looks first at the current directory and tries to import itself, rather than importing package requests from site-packages.

I would really appreciate your help with this matter, as I have no clue what else to try.

Additional information:

1. I installed haystack package using shell-command pip install haystack[all], which installed the version 1.16.1 for me
2. used OS is Linux
3. used Python 3.9
4. I am using a CPU (although it is not relevant for the issue)
5. I am using a conda virtual environment (called conda_env_py39)