Why is “import *” bad?

Question

It is recommended to not to use import * in Python.

Can anyone please share the reason for that, so that I can avoid it doing next time?

Answer 1

Say you have the following code in a module called foo:

import ElementTree as etree

and then in your own module you have:

from lxml import etree
from foo import *

You now have a difficult-to-debug module that looks like it has lxml's etree in it, but really has ElementTree instead.