How to Import a File in Python

1. Import a File With the import Statement in Python
2. Import a File With the importlib Module in Python
3. Import a Specific Module From a File With the from Clause in Python

In this tutorial, we will discuss methods to import a file in Python.

Import a File With the import Statement in Python

The import statement is used to import packages, modules, and libraries in Python. The import statement can also be used to import files. For this tutorial, we have two code files, A.py and main.py. The contents of the A.py code files are given below.

A.py file:

class Aclass:
    a = 5

    def show(this):
        print("Hello! this is class A")

We want to import this A.py file code in our main.py file. The following code example shows us how we can import files into our code with the import statement in Python.

main.py file:

import A

obj = A.Aclass()

obj.show()

Output:

Hello! this is class A

In the above code, we import the A.py file and call the show() function inside the Aclass class.

Import a File With the importlib Module in Python

The importlib module has many methods for interacting with the import system of Python. The importlib.import_module() function can be used to import files inside our code. The following code example shows us how we can import files into our code with the importlib module in Python.

import importlib

file = importlib.import_module("A")

obj = file.Aclass()

obj.show()

Output:

Hello! this is class A

In the above code, we imported the A.py file code with the importlib module and called the show() function inside the Aclass class.

Import a Specific Module From a File With the from Clause in Python

The from clause can be added to the conventional import statement to import only a subset of the file in Python. The from clause is useful if we only want to import one or more modules from a file but not the complete file itself. The following code example shows us how to import a specific module from a file into our code with the from clause in Python.

from A import Aclass

var1 = Aclass()

var1.show()

Output:

Hello! this is class A