Sure, ok, I think I am with you now.
You get a (e.g.) variable name as a string, and you KNOW how to evaluate it with "eval", but you also want to be able to assign back to (through) the string representation?
One way (if I understand you correctly) is with the globals or locals dicts. Try this in IDLE:
'>>> a = 3 '>>> y = 'a' '>>> eval(y) 3 '>>> d = locals() # Get a dictionary of local variables '>>> d['a'] 3 '>>> d[y] 3 '>>> d[y] = 8 # y is a string = 'a' '>>> a # The value of a is changed. 8 '>>>
Is this kinda what you mean? I'm still new at this (and don't know REXX from Adam).
Thanks Caleb
There are many situations where this is useful. For instance, you might be
getting an input which is a string representing the name of a variable and
you wish to evaluate the expression (like a calculator application, for
instance).
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