Renaming an Imported Module

00:00 The import statement is quite flexible. There are four variations that you should know about. First, import <module>, import <module> as <other_name>, from <module> import <name>, and from <module> import <name> as some other name. You already worked with the first import statement.

00:20 Let’s look at the three other import statement variations in detail.

00:25 With an import statement that looks like this—import <module> as some other module name—you can change the name of an import when you import a module.

00:35 This way, the module’s namespace is accessed through <other_name> instead of <module>. So how does this look in action?

00:46 In your project, change the import statement in main.py to the following: import adder as a, and then leave the code below unchanged.

00:58 Save the file and run it. Now a NameError is raised: NameError: name 'adder' is not defined. The reason why Python raised this NameError is because the module has been imported with the name a instead of adder. Therefore, the adder name doesn’t exist anymore and it’s no longer recognized.

01:20 To make main.py work, you need to replace adder.add() and adder.double() with a.add() and a.double(). So let’s do that. In the line after the import statement, you change the value to a.add(), and in the line below, you change the value of double_value to a.double().

01:47 Now save the file and run the module.

01:51 No NameError is raised, and the values 4 and 8 are printed in the interactive window. So changing the name of an import can be handy when you want to make a name unique or shorten long module names. For example, if you are importing a module, and the module’s name is a name that you already have for a variable, then it can make sense to rename the module that you’re importing to a different name.

02:16 But usually, you rename a module that you’re importing because the name of the module that you’re importing is very long. So shortening can make sense. However, you could argue that shortening the name to a single letter isn’t particularly descriptive, and it’s not super short, as you still need the notation in front of the function name. So let’s have a look at another import variant.