Question

I have a class that needs access to urllib2, the trivial example for me is:

class foo(object):
    myStringHTML = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

How should I structure my code to include urllib2? In general, I want to store foo in a utility module with a number of other classes, and be able to import foo by itself from the module:

from utilpackage import foo

Is the correct style to put the import inside the class? This seems strange to me, but it works….

class import_u2_in_foo(object):
    import urllib2
    myStringHtml = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

Or should I move foo into another package so I always use

import foo
# then foo.py contains
import urllib2
class foo(object):
    myStringHtml = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

How should I structure my code here to be the most pythonic :)?

Answer 1

You should import it in the utilpackage module, but only export the class foo from it:

import urllib2

__all__ = ["foo"]

class foo(object):
    myStringHtml = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

Then you can do

from utilpackage import foo

but not

from utilpackage import urllib2

That’s best practice for from-imports in my opinion.