Question

Say I only needed to use findall() from the re module, is it more efficient to do:

from re import findall 

or

import re 

Is there actually any difference in speed/memory usage etc?

Answer 1

There is no difference on the import, however there is a small difference on access.

When you access the function as

re.findall()  

python will need to first find the module in the global scope and then find findall in modules dict. May make a difference if you are calling it inside a loop thousands of times.