Question

I have made a simple, test program to experiment using classes. It creates a “person” class, which takes the arguments of name and age. I am now trying to create an interactive program that allows the user to manage a list of people, like a register or address book. They can create a new person, as shown in the function below.

def createnew():
    newname = input("What is their name?")
    newage = input("How old are they?")

    newperson = Person(newname, newage)

Of course the problem with the above is it assigns newname literally rather than the string value of “newname”. So I tried

newperson.lower() = Person(newname, newage)
str(newperson) = Person(newname, newage)
newperson[0:] = Person(newname, newage)

but they all return the error, can’t assign to function call.
My question is how do I access the value of the variable newname and assign it to the Person, or any other class.

Note: I am a n00b/newb, meaning I have not come from another language, and am following a book. Please explain any answers given if they are not ridiculously obvious.

Many Thanks.

To make it slightly clearer, I am trying to make the user-inputted value for the new person’s name the object name ( in my example it is newperson )

Update:

Thanks for all the answers, I gather it’s not a great idea to allow the user to set variable names so I re-jigged my code. I made a dictionary which after the user has created a new person, writes the data given by the class str function to the key of the given name. While this means I can’t then access the object later on, because newperson will have been overwritten, it allows me to build a list of people with a set of data which is what I wanted to do in the first place, I just mistakingly thought it would be easier to set the object name.
Thanks again.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, what you want is to create the Person object, then create a global variable with the name being the name of the person.

This is bad.

What you really want is a way to store people objects and retrieve them later by their names. So, use a dictionary:

people = {}

def createnew():
    ...
    people[newname] = Person(newname, newage)

Then later, you can access the Person in the dictionary:

print(people['name of the person'])

(I’m assuming that you’re using Python 3, since you’re using input() rather than raw_input() as in Python 2.x)

If you really must create a new variable (which is bad, since people’s names aren’t usually valid Python identifiers), use the globals() function:

>>> globals()['foo'] = 2
>>> foo
2

but I include this for the sake of completeness. Don’t use this!