Style question: Importing modules from packages - 'from' vs 'as'

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Wed Dec 3 06:02:17 EST 2014


When importing a module from a subpackage, it's sometimes convenient
to refer to it throughout the code with a one-part name rather than
two. I'm going to use 'os.path' for the examples, but my actual
use-case is a custom package where the package name is, in the
application, quite superfluous.

Throughout the code, I want to refer to "path.split()",
"path.isfile()", etc, without the "os." in front of them. I could do
either of these:

import os.path as path
from os import path

Which one would you recommend? Does it depend on context?

An "as" import works only if it's a module in a package, where the
"from" import can also import other objects (you can't go "import
pprint.pprint as pprint"). I'm fairly sure that's an argument... on
one side or another. :)

Thoughts?

ChrisA



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