Importing objects
Now that you know a lot about functions, let's see how to use them. The whole point of writing functions is to be able to later reuse them, and this in Python translates to importing them into the namespace in which you need them. There are many different ways to import objects into a namespace, but the most common ones are just two: import module_name
and from module_name import function_name
. Of course, these are quite simplistic examples, but bear with me for the time being.
The form import module_name
finds the module module_name
and defines a name for it in the local namespace where the import
statement is executed.
The form from module_name import identifier
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, like this:
from mymodule...