Does PEP-8 mandate imports or global variables first?

Question

May I know in a Python environment, which is compliant with PEP-8?

Imports before global variables:

import some_library
GLOBAL_VARIABLE = "something"

Or global variables before imports:

GLOBAL_VARIABLE = "something"
import some_library

Answer 1

PEP 8 says about imports:

Imports are always put at the top of the file, just after any module comments and docstrings, and before module globals and constants.

so this

import some_library
GLOBAL_VARIABLE = "something"

is PEP-8 compliant, and this

GLOBAL_VARIABLE = "something"
import some_library

is not.

Answer 2

The standard is for the imports to come before the global variables. There are several advantages to this:

1. If you import a file with a global of the same name, then the variable defined in the import will take priority.
2. If you import a file with another global, you won't have to write it here.
3. You can import a file of globals and isolate that complexity.

As mentioned in some other comments, using globals is not really the best practice in Python. You can read more about this here.