Use from module import* vs use import module in python 3

Question

The 2 do the same thing (I think at least), but have always told me that import module is better then I always used this method, but the method from module import * makes the code more concise since you don’t have to keep calling the module all the time. So I wanted a more advanced opinion on this explaining why I use one or the other, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Never use from module import *. The "concision" in this case is an illusion.

The * removes a level of determism to your code, making some static correction check features impossible (for example, if you enter a wrong variable name, no tool will be able to point this out, since there is no way to know if the wrong name exists between what was imported with "*").

And that disrupts not only tools, but human programmers: in complex code with multiple Mports, after a week or two, you see a call function, and you can’t know where it came from, for example.

And it’s even dangerous: if you have more than one import with "*" in the same module, an import that comes after could overwrite names that had already been imported - and you won’t know that. Even worse: this over-written import could happen in a later version of a library, so that your code works when it is done, and mysteriously stops working when updating some dependency.

So: no.

As for "concision", it is relative. The syntax of import in Python is very flexible, and you probably have to keep this desired concision even without introducing the ambiguity of *: you can import only the names that need some module, for example doing from modulo import metodo1, metodo2, or, in the case of a module from which you will call a lot, use only a smaller name for it, such as import numpy as np or import typing as T.