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pythonimportmodulepackage
trinth
trinth

Reputation: 6047

When or why to use relative imports in Python

Are there any rules or guidelines concerning when to use relative imports in Python? I see them in use all the time, such as in the Flask web framework. When searching for this topic, I only see articles on how to use relative imports, but not why.

So is there some special benefit to using:

from . import x

rather than:

from package import x

Moreover, I noticed that a related SO post mentions that relative imports are discouraged. Yet people still continue to use them.

Upvotes: 40

Views: 18278

Answers (1)

Bartek
Bartek

Reputation: 15599

Check out PEP 328's section on relative imports

The rationale seems to be as written:

Several use cases were presented, the most important of which is being able to rearrange the structure of large packages without having to edit sub-packages. In addition, a module inside a package can't easily import itself without relative imports.

Upvotes: 34

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