how to get string itself as a variable

Question

I tried in all ways, could not get any solution for it.

I'm stuck in an application, i will give similar example ,

i have some strings,

arg = "school"
arg_2 = "college"

school = "enjoy"
college = "study"

i want to use it in code as below

if ( arg == arg  )
  \\ want to print content of school here, 
else
  \\ want to print content of college here,

can i make it with the help of string 'arg' only? i don't want to use the name of string 'school' here. is there any method to do that?

`if ( arg == arg )` despite the redundant parentheses is **always** true: any object always equals itself. This essentially makes it impossible to gauge **what** you're actually asking! — Alex Martelli, Feb 10 '15 at 06:14

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

2

You can use locals to do this

>>> arg = "school"
>>> arg_2 = "college"
>>> school = "enjoy"
>>> college = "study"
>>> locals()[arg]
'enjoy'
>>> locals()[arg_2]
'study'

So you could simply print a statement like

>>> "{} at {}".format(locals()[arg], arg)
'enjoy at school'
>>> "{} at {}".format(locals()[arg_2], arg_2)
'study at college'

PS: doing arg == arg is completely redundant, it will always evaluate to True

edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Community

1
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answered Feb 10 '15 at 06:15

Anshul Goyal

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yeah, that was on oversight for equating arg to arg, thank you :) – Shrinidhi Kanchi Feb 10 '15 at 06:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '15 at 06:26

I am assuming that your goal is to get indirect access to values. In that case, consider putting your variables in a class or a dictionary. Here is an example of the class approach:

class mydata(object):
    arg = "school"
    arg_2 = "college"

    school = "enjoy"
    college = "study"

    def value_of_value(self, s):
        return getattr(self, getattr(self, s))

x = mydata()
print 'arg->', x.value_of_value('arg')
print 'arg_2->', x.value_of_value('arg_2')

This produces:

arg-> enjoy
arg_2-> study

how to get string itself as a variable

2 Answers2