I question what you're trying to accomplish here. A better answer is probably to write a accessor function that can safely get the field you want without having to type the whole thing out every time.
Consider the following code:
def ACCESS(*strings):
def ACCESS_LAMBDA(dic):
result = dic
for key in strings:
result = result[key]
return result
return ACCESS_LAMBDA
dic = { 'aa': { 'bb': { 'cc': 42 } } }
ABC_ACCESS = ACCESS('aa','bb','cc')
print ABC_ACCESS(dic)
This is called a closure, where you can define a function at runtime. Here you'd create pull_goodwill = ACCESS('Financials','Balance_Sheet','Goodwill') then get the value with Data_pulled = pull_goodwill(data)
This doesn't exactly answer your question, and the star-arguments and Lambda-returned-function are pretty advanced things. But, don't just "call eval()" that's a pretty insecure coding habit to get into. eval() has its uses... But, think about what you're trying to do, and see if there is a simple abstraction that you can program to access the data you want, rather than relying on the python parser to fetch a value from a dict.
edit:
Link to information about closures in python
edit2:
In order to not have to pass a dictionary to the returned lambda-function, you can pass it into the function constructor. Here's what that would look like, note the change to ACCESS's definition now includes dic and that the ACCESS_LAMBDA definition now takes no arguments.
def ACCESS(dic, *strings):
def ACCESS_LAMBDA():
result = dic
for key in strings:
result = result[key]
return result
return ACCESS_LAMBDA
dic = { 'a': { 'b': { 'c': 42 } } }
ABC_ACCESS = ACCESS(dic, 'a','b','c')
print ABC_ACCESS()
(Note here, that if dict is modified, then the ABC_ACCESS value will change. this is because python passes by reference, if you want a constant value you'd need to make a copy of dic.)
