I don't understand the 'from' in Python [duplicate]

Question

from glob import glob
from os.path import isfile
def countwords(fp):
   with open(fp) as fh:
       return len(fh.read().split())

print "There are" ,sum(map(countwords, filter(isfile, glob("*.txt") ) ) ), "words in the files."

in the first line, why don't this just simply import glob library?

Is there any reason for using "from glob" in front of "import glob"?

Answer 1

If you write import glob, you would need to use glob.glob.

from glob import glob takes glob.glob and makes it available as just glob.

Answer 2

>>> import glob
>>> dir(glob)
['__all__', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '__package__', 
 'fnmatch', 'glob', 'glob0', 'glob1', 'has_magic', 'iglob', 'magic_check', 
 'os', 're', 'sys']

You can see all of the functions in the glob module here, you may for example want an iterator version of glob and in that case you would use:

from glob import iglob