Question

i would like to write a class that takes in a couple of variables in the form of (variableName, value). However variable names are only known at runtime and also the number of args are known at runtime. In my class, i have an object where i want to set those paramaters. So what i need to loop over all variables and setattribute as below.

setattr (self.obj, variableName, value)
self.obj.make()

Answer 1

You can do:

class C(object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        for (variableName, value) in kwargs.items():
            # setattr(), etc.

which you would call with C(x=3, y=123,…).

If you really want to use a [variableName, value,…] list of arguments, you can do:

class C(object):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        arg_iter = iter(args)
        for (variableName, value) in zip(arg_iter, arg_iter):
            # setattr(), etc.

which you call with C('x', 3, 'y', 123,…). The zip() trick groups arguments of the list of arguments (args) by pairs. You might want to add a check on the number of arguments passed (C(3) is accepted by the above code because zip() does not mind using two sequences of different length).