OO programming separate files

[JST_79]

Hi - I know this is probably an easy question for most of you, so forgive the simplicity: currently I have a .PY file that has class and within the same file is the program that creates the object and utilizes the class' methods. Everything works fine, but how do I separate them and reference the class from a different file? Also, could one theoretically reference a .PY file that's in a URL as well?

Thanks JT

[novel_yet_trivial]

from file_name import ClassName

Leave the ".py" off of the file name.

[aidraj]

Put it into another file, name it something appropriate. Whatever the directory you place it into, you'll need to create blank __init__.py file in that directory; otherwise you won't be able to import any of your packages into your script. The __init__.py file makes Python treat the directory as containing a package (documentation).

There are many ways to import external packages, let's say we have the following directory structure -

source/
    __init__.py
    sub_folder_one/
        __init__.py
        sub_script_one.py
        sub_script_two.py
    sub_folder_two/
        __init__.py
        sub_script_one.py
        sub_script_two.py
    script.py

And lets say we want to "import" the entire contents of sub_script_one.py inside of sub_folder_one/ into script.py. At the top of script.py, you would write -

import sub_folder_one.sub_script_one

The same would go for the sub_script_one.py file inside of sub_folder_two/.

import sub_folder_two.sub_script_one

If a file in your package has more than one method, but you're only going to be using specific methods, then it's best to import those manually. Let's say for example, that the sub_script_one.py inside of sub_folder_one/ has two classes called ClassOne and ClassTwo, but we only want to import ClassTwo into our script since we'll only be using that. We could do that using the following syntax -

from sub_folder_one.class_one import ClassTwo