Dynamic creation of variables (for Lists)

Question

I know this is likely a bad idea.. but seems the \"best\" way to do this outside of creating all possible options and ignore the unused results. I have a source file that contai

Answer 1

I do not recommend polluting your namespace by dynamically generating variables. This could especially get out of hand with large lists. You should just use a dictionary instead.

In [941]: d = {x : [] for x in  'abcde'}; d
Out[941]: {'a': [], 'b': [], 'c': [], 'd': [], 'e': []}

Look how easy this is to create and maintain.

Answer 2

Assuming you mean not "the start of a list", but "the name of a list" (as your code would suggest)... yes, this is a bad idea. You should probably use a dict instead, something like

d = {var_name: [] for var_name in current_list}

Actually this is kind of what Python does behind the scenes. When you write

a = []

then Python is adding an entry a: [] to (something basically equivalent to) a dict. You can see what's in that dictionary using the globals() function if at module scope, or locals() if inside a function.