Question

in my program, i have a list of lists that needs to be accessed based on the contents of a variable.

string = [
         [arg1, arg2, arg3],
         [arg1, arg2, arg3]
         ]

string2 = [
          [arg1, arg2, arg3],
          [arg1, arg2, arg3]
          ]

however, this will always be a string.

Class.variable = 'string' # this can be either 'string' or 'string2'

the code i have to access the list of list is

newVariable = Class.variable[seperateVariable][0]

however, this causes an error

IndexError: string index out of range

i’ve figured out the cause of this is because Class.variable is a string and not actually a variable.

what would be the best scaling way to solve this?

Answer 1

I think you’d be better off with a dictionary if Class.variable really needs to be a string (for example because it’s user input):

strings = { "string": [[arg1, arg2, arg3],[arg1, arg2, arg3]], 
            "string2": [[arg1, arg2, arg3],[arg1, arg2, arg3]] }

Now you can access strings[separateVariable][0].

(In your example, you were trying to access "string"[separateVariable][0] which fails for sufficiently high values of separateVariable).