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<H1><A NAME="SECTION0001000000000000000000">
9 PEP 328: Multi-line Imports</A>
</H1>

<P>
One language change is a small syntactic tweak aimed at making it
easier to import many names from a module.  In a
<code>from <var>module</var> import <var>names</var></code> statement,
<var>names</var> is a sequence of names separated by commas.  If the sequence is
very long, you can either write multiple imports from the same module,
or you can use backslashes to escape the line endings like this:

<P>
<div class="verbatim"><pre>
from SimpleXMLRPCServer import SimpleXMLRPCServer,\
            SimpleXMLRPCRequestHandler,\
            CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler,\
            resolve_dotted_attribute
</pre></div>

<P>
The syntactic change in Python 2.4 simply allows putting the names
within parentheses.  Python ignores newlines within a parenthesized
expression, so the backslashes are no longer needed:

<P>
<div class="verbatim"><pre>
from SimpleXMLRPCServer import (SimpleXMLRPCServer,
                                SimpleXMLRPCRequestHandler,
                                CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler,
                                resolve_dotted_attribute)
</pre></div>

<P>
The PEP also proposes that all <tt class="keyword">import</tt> statements be absolute
imports, with a leading "<tt class="samp">.</tt>" character to indicate a relative
import.  This part of the PEP is not yet implemented, and will have to
wait for Python 2.5 or some other future version.

<P>
<div class="seealso">
  <p class="heading">See Also:</p>

<dl compact="compact" class="seerfc">
    <dt><a href="http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0328.html"
        title="Imports: Multi-Line and Absolute/Relative"
        >PEP 328, <em>Imports: Multi-Line and Absolute/Relative</em></a>
    <dd>Written by Aahz.  Multi-line imports were implemented by
             Dima Dorfman.
  </dl>
</div>

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