Assign multiple variables at once with dynamic variable names

python mass-assignment destructuring
mikemaccana picture mikemaccana · Mar 11, 2011 · Viewed 45.2k times · Source

I'm aware I can assign multiple variables to multiple values at once with:

(foo, bar, baz) = 1, 2, 3

And have foo = 1, bar = 2, and so on.

But how could I make the names of the variables more dynamic? Ie,

somefunction(data,tupleofnames):
    (return that each name mapped to a single datum)

somefunction((1,2,3),(foo,bar,baz))

And have the same?

Answer

Thomas K picture Thomas K · Mar 11, 2011

There are ways to do it, but they're not nice ways, and it's considered bad practice in Python. New variables shouldn't be created by magic. If you want to have a collection of things, use a list, dictionary or set, as appropriate.

For example, you could return a dictionary: {"foo":1, "bar":2, "baz":3}

Related questions

How do I list all files of a directory?

How can I list all files of a directory in Python and add them to a list?

Read More
Iterating over dictionaries using 'for' loops

I am a bit puzzled by the following code: d = {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3} for key in d: print key, 'corresponds to', d[key] What I don't understand is the key portion. How does Python recognize that it needs only to …

Read More
Does Python have a string 'contains' substring method?

I'm looking for a string.contains or string.indexof method in Python. I want to do: if not somestring.contains("blah"): continue

Read More