Question

I am trying to make a function that creates classes, and append these classes to a list.

When I run the program: I get the following error:

NameError: name ‘jackie’ is not defined

This implies can only use the instance inside the function. How can I make it global?, I tried global eval('jackie') but doesn’t work.

population =[]
class person():pass
def createdarwin(name):
    global population
    darwin=p.image.load('darwin.png')
    vars()[name]=person(darwin)
    population.append(name)
def main():
    createdarwin('jackie')
    for i in population:
                eval(i).update()

Answer 1

If you want variably-named variables, then use a dictionary instead. Then you don’t need vars() and you don’t need eval():

population = {}
class Person(object):
    pass

def create_darwin(name):
    darwin = p.image.load('darwin.png')
    population[name] = person(darwin)

def main():
    create_darwin('jackie')
    for name in population:
        population[name].update()