Question

Basically I want to turn a string in to an identifier for an object like so:

count = 0
for i in range(50):
   count += 1
   functionToMakeIdentifier("foo" + str(count)) = Object(init_variable)

I want to make a series of objects with names like foo1, foo2, foo3, foo4, foo5, etc… But I don’t know how to turn those strings into identifiers for the objects. Help!

Answer 1

You don’t. You use an array (aka list in Python), or a dictionary if you want/need to use something more fancy than consecutive integers (e.g. strings) for identifying the individual items.

For example:

foos = []
count = 0
for i in range(50):
   count += 1
   foos.append(Object(init_variable))

Afterwards, you can refer to the first foo as foos[0] and the 50th foo as foo[49] (indices start at 0 – sure seems weird, but once you get used to it, it’s at least as fine as long as everybody agrees on one thing — and Python encourages 0-based indices, e.g. range counts from 0).

Also, your code can be simplified further. If you just want to generate a list of Object instances, you can use list comprehension (will propably take a while until your class or book or tutorial covers this…). Also, in your specific example, count and i are identical and can thus be merged (and when you want to count along something you iterate like for item in items: ..., you can use for count, item in enumerate(items)).