Question

I have a list of variable names, like this:

['foo', 'bar', 'baz'] 

(I originally asked how I convert a list of variables. See Greg Hewgill’s answer below.)

How do I convert this to a dictionary where the keys are the variable names (as strings) and the values are the values of the variables?

{'foo': foo, 'bar': bar, 'baz': baz} 

Now that I’m re-asking the question, I came up with:

d = {} for name in list_of_variable_names:     d[name] = eval(name) 

Can that be improved upon?

Update, responding to the question (in a comment) of why I’d want to do this:

I often find myself using the % operator to strings with a dictionary of names and values to interpolate. Often the names in the string is just the names of local variables. So (with the answer below) I can do something like this:

message = '''Name: %(name)s ZIP: %(zip)s  Dear %(name)s, ...''' % dict((x, locals()[x]) for x in ['name', 'zip']) 

Answer 1

Forget filtering locals()! The dictionary you give to the formatting string is allowed to contain unused keys:

>>> name = 'foo' >>> zip = 123 >>> unused = 'whoops!' >>> locals() {'name': 'foo', 'zip': 123, ... 'unused': 'whoops!', ...} >>> '%(name)s %(zip)i' % locals() 'foo 123' 

With the new f-string feature in Python 3.6, using locals() is no longer necessary:

>>> name = 'foo' >>> zip = 123 >>> unused = 'whoops!' >>> f'{zip: >5} {name.upper()}' '  123 FOO'