Circular (or cyclic) imports in Python

Question

What will happen if two modules import each other?

To generalize the problem, what about the cyclic imports in Python?

Answer 1

I completely agree with pythoneer's answer here. But I have stumbled on some code that was flawed with circular imports and caused issues when trying to add unit tests. So to quickly patch it without changing everything you can resolve the issue by doing a dynamic import.

# Hack to import something without circular import issue
def load_module(name):
    """Load module using imp.find_module"""
    names = name.split(".")
    path = None
    for name in names:
        f, path, info = imp.find_module(name, path)
        path = [path]
    return imp.load_module(name, f, path[0], info)
constants = load_module("app.constants")

Again, this isn't a permanent fix but may help someone that wants to fix an import error without changing too much of the code.

Cheers!