Tool to help eliminate wildcard imports

NB: pylint does not recommend a set of used imports. When changing this, you have to be aware of other modules importing the code you are modifying, which could use symbols which belong to the namespace of the module you are refactoring only because you have unused imports.

I recommend the following procedure to refactor from foo import *:

• in an interactive shell, type:

  import re
  import foo as module # XXX use the correct module name here!
  
  module_name = module.__name__
  import_line = 'from %s import (%%s)' % module_name
  length = len(import_line) - 3
  print import_line % (',\n' + length * ' ').join([a for a in dir(module) 
                                                                 if not re.match('__.*[^_]{2}', a)])
  

• replace the from foo import * line with the one printed above

• run pylint, and remove the unused imports flagged by pylint
• run pylint again on the whole code based, looking for imports of non existing sympols
• run your unit tests

repeat with from bar import *

Here's dewildcard, a very simple tool based on Alex's initial ideas:

https://github.com/quentinsf/dewildcard