Question

Is it possible to create a variable name based on the value of a string?

I have a script that will read a file for blocks of information and store them in a dictionary. Each block’s dictionary will then be appended to a ‘master’ dictionary. The number of blocks of information in a file will vary and uses the word ‘done’ to indicate the end of a block.

I want to do something like this:

master={}
block=0
for lines in file:
  if line != "done":
    $block.append(line)
  elif line == "done":
    master['$block'].append($block)
    block = block + 1

If a file had content like so:

eggs
done
bacon
done
ham
cheese
done

The result would be a dictionary with 3 lists:

master = {'0': ["eggs"], '1': ["bacon"], '2': ["ham", "cheese"]}

How could this be accomplished?

Answer 1

I would actually suggest you to use a list instead. Is there any specific point why would you need dicts that are array-ish?

In case you could do with an array, you can use this:

with open("yourFile") as fd:
    arr = [x.strip().split() for x in fd.read().split("done")][:-1]

Output:

[['eggs'], ['bacon'], ['ham', 'cheese']]

---

In case you wanted number-string indices, you could use this:

with open("yourFile") as fd:
    l = [x.strip().split() for x in fd.read().split("done")][:-1]
    print dict(zip(map(str,range(len(l))),l))