Delete unused imports

[astier]

Would it be possible to delete unused import?

[anirudnits]

Hi! if nobody is already working on this, I would like to give it a shot. I'm still in the process of going through the codebase and afterwards will be able, hopefully to come up with some way to get it done.

[jugmac00]

Just as a note - flake8 already gives a warning about unused imports, so maybe it is not necessary to also include it in this package. In the spirit of do one thing and do it well.

[anirudnits]

@jugmac00 thanks. I think the issue is to remove the unused imports, which could be a nice little addition to isort especially in module(s) with a large number of imports.

[jugmac00]

@anirudnits I just applied Flake8 (F401 Module imported but unused) to a large legacy code base - and yes, it was a bit of work to delete all unused imports by hand, but even Flake8 marked one import as unused although it was used.

I would not feel well with isort removing imports.

This is only my personal opinion. When unused imports get deleted automatically in future, I just can hope my test suite is good enough to find all false positives.

Update
My test suite caught two more false positives from Flake8

[anirudnits]

@jugmac00 that's a valid concern and I do understand why this feature will negatively impact isort.

[timothycrosley]

I'm perfectly happy with isort doing this, as long as it requires a CLI flag, and can't be made the default via a config file. isort itself would break if its own "unused" imports were removed. But yeah, I can only see havoc happening if this could be put in a config, and happened automatically to everyone using precommit.

[bersbersbers]

Would it be possible to delete unused import?

What this would mean in any decent editor with automatic input sorting: you comment out the last line the requires an import, you save the file -> the import is gone. You uncomment the same line, you save the file -> the import does not come back, you are left with non-working code. That goes way beyond what I would expect i*sort* to do.

This definitely needs a default-off flag. Or maybe do this in a separate iclean binary?

[timothycrosley]

I really like the idea of a separate command to do it. Especially, since unlike isort itself, it would likely utilize flake8 or a different external library to identify the unused imports as others have already solved that problem well - isort's job would just be to make sure the format doesn't change during / after the removal.

[lyz-code]

Hi all, I've just created autoimport for this purpose. Issues and pull requests are welcome :)

[ZeeD]

While I agree that this could be a default-off option, I think that should be possible to set a "remove unused imports" flag in the config file.
Keep in mind that the "action" of sorting import can broke code, so it's not really that different to "protect" the offending rows as the other false positive cases

Moreover at the moment I use isort in eclipse (through PyDev) with a specific keybinding (CTRL-SHIFT-o, or "Source"->"Organize Imports"). What it normally does is modify the imports - but it doesn't save, allowing the user to look at it and decide by himself.
My worflow is something like add code, imports are imported automatically, do test, etc... delete unused code. save. "Organize imports" (look at the result) and eventually save again.

[PeterJCLaw]

You might be interested in a tool (fix8) I'm working on to automatically fix various flake8-highlighted errors; which includes support for removing unused imports. It's very rough around the edges at the moment, but having been using it myself for ~6 months I'm finding it really handy.

If there's interest in it, I've also got the beginnings of a VSCode plugin for it; not published yet though.

[adzenith]

autoflake will also remove unused imports using pyflakes (which is what flake8 uses to check for extra imports).

[hadialqattan]

In my opinion, there is no need to add this functionality while some advanced tools like pycln already exist to accomplish this task elegantly.