Calling a variable the value of another variable

Question

I'm creating a loop which looks a it like this

players = int(input('How many players? '))
for i in range (0,players):
   name = input('What is your name? ')

Then I want the next variable to be 'value_of_' and then whatever they inputed as their name will be in the name of the variable.

To clarify, if you type your name as "Joe" then you want a variable Joe whose value is "Joe"? — , Dec 18 '15 at 23:06

timgeb · Answer 1 · 2015-12-18T23:16:57.573

2

You need to store that input-values somewhere, in a list for example. A concise way to achieve what you want would be:

playernames = [input('What is your name? ') for _ in range(players)]

You could also use a dictionary to map the string 'player_nr_X' to the playernames like this:

playernames = {'player_nr_' + str(i + 1) : input('What is your name? ') for i in range(players)}

Of course, you could also simply use integer keys in your dictionary.

Demo:

>>> players = 3
>>> {'player_nr_' + str(i + 1) : input('What is your name? ') for i in range(players)}
What is your name? 'bob'
What is your name? 'alice'
What is your name? 'jeff'
{'player_nr_1': 'bob', 'player_nr_2': 'alice', 'player_nr_3': 'jeff'}

edited Dec 18 '15 at 23:16

answered Dec 18 '15 at 23:05

timgeb

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You can use `raw_input()` for retrieving strings. – cwahls Dec 18 '15 at 23:13
@ClaytonWahlstrom I assume we are talking Python3 here because the author used `input`. – timgeb Dec 18 '15 at 23:14
`input` works, I guess `raw_input` becomes deprecated in 3. – cwahls Dec 18 '15 at 23:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 18 '15 at 23:14

computed variable names are a bad idea, they make writing code more difficult. What you want to do instead is use a dictionary where the keys are the names.

For example:

values = {}
players = int(input('How many players? '))
for i in range (0,players):
   name = input('What is your name? ')
   value[name] = i

Or, if you want to use the index value as the key, and the name as the value:

value[i] = name

Calling a variable the value of another variable

2 Answers2