Removing unused variables doesn't work

[aprilahijriyan]

I have a sample bad_code.py script below:

import os  # unused import
import abc

unused_var = 1
print("hello world")

And I run it with the command:

autoflake --in-place --remove-unused-variables --remove-all-unused-imports bad_code.py

However, the unused_var variable is not deleted :/

[edvardm]

I would say it makes sense it isn't removed, as unused_var has global scope here.

If that code was in a library foo, then unused_var could be accessed with foo.unused_var which might be part of it's api, hence not safe to remove.

If you had

import os  # unused import
import abc

def fun():
    unused_var = 1
    print("hello world")

then it would be removed, as it's a local variable (which could not be accessed outside fun)