Importing objects
Now that we know a lot about functions, let us look at how to use them. The whole point of writing functions is to be able to reuse them later and, in Python, this translates to importing them into the namespace where they are needed. There are many ways to import objects into a namespace, but the most common ones are import module_name
and from module_name import function_name
. Of course, these are quite simplistic examples, but bear with us for the time being.
The import module_name
form finds the module_name
module and defines a name for it in the local namespace, where the import
statement is executed. The from module_name import identifier
form is a little bit more complicated than that but basically does the same thing. It finds module_name
and searches for an attribute (or a submodule) and stores a reference to identifier
in the local namespace. Both forms have the option to change the name of the imported object using the as
clause:
from mymodule...