On 02 Jul 2004 08:08:59 -0400, Heather Coppersmith <me@privacy.net> wrote:
The usual comp.lang.python answer is "why do you want to do this?"
In most cases, wanting to do this is a symptom of something else
being sub-optimal. Perhaps it's as simple as putting x and y into
a dictionary instead of creating them as class attributes:
I think a good reason for wanting to map string values into literal
variables/methods/classes such as Joseph explained, is so that they
can be dynamically defined in something such as a config file, for
example.
I wrote a simple application which had a basic text based
configuration file, and a key/value pair defined as:
MODULES = mod1, mod2, ..modN
.... where each module was seperated by commas, and read into the
application as strings. getattr() and __import__() proved very useful
at this point, allowing me to dynamically load the modules, and the
classes within using the config string values.
-- Brian Jones