Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Importing Modules

To gain access to the variables and functions from a module, you have to import it. To tell Python that you want to use functions in module math, for example, you use this import statement:

>>> import math

Importing a module creates a new variable with that name. That variable refers to an object whose type is module:

>>> type(math)
<class 'module'>

Once you have imported a module, you can use built-in function help to see what it contains. Here is the first part of the help output:

>>> help(math)

Help on module math:

NAME
    math

MODULE REFERENCE
    http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/math

    The following documentation is automatically generated from the Python
 source files. It may ...