Python Programming/Modules and how to use them

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search

← User Interaction| Files →

Modules are libraries that can be called from other scripts. For example, a popular module is the time module, or the time module. You can call it using:

import time

. Then, open up time.py You will see a bunch of various functions in the file. An example is below:

import time
 
def main():
    #define the variable 'current_time' as a tuple of time.localtime()
    current_time = time.localtime() 
    print current_time # print the tuple
    # if the year is 2008 (first value in the current_time tuple)
    if current_time[0] == 2008: 
        print 'The year is 2008' # print the year
 
if __name__ == '__main__': # if the function is the main function ...
    main() # ...call it

Modules can be called in a various number of ways. For example, we could import the time module as t:

import time as t # import the time module and call it 't'
 
def main():
    current_time = t.localtime() 
    print current_time
    if current_time[0] == 2008: 
        print 'The year is 2008'
 
if __name__ == '__main__': 
    main()
Previous: User Interaction Index Next: Files
Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python_Programming/Modules_and_how_to_use_them"
Personal tools