Deleting all objects by substring

Asked May 14 '23 at 20:03

Active May 14 '23 at 20:38

Viewed 33 times

Consider the following simple environment:

x1 = 5
x2 = 1
x3 = 100
y = 'Desk'

deletes = [x for x in dir() if x.lower().startswith('x')]
print(deletes)

for i in deletes:
    del i

print(x1)

I want to delete all objects in my current environment that begin with a certain substring, in this case such that only y remains. However, Python still recognizes x1 when I print it below the loop, which means it's not yet been deleted. I know I could just do

del x1, x2, x3

, but I don't want to because I want to be able to delete all objects to the n-th degree, and would not want to do del x1...,x100 for every single object in question. How do I fix this?

edited May 14 '23 at 20:17

mkrieger1

19,194
5
54
65

asked May 14 '23 at 20:03

Jared Greathouse

On module level you can remove it from the dict returned by `globals()`. `del i` removes the variable `i` without caring about its content. – Michael Butscher May 14 '23 at 20:21
`del i` just deletes the loop variable, not the global variable it refers to. – mkrieger1 May 14 '23 at 20:21
`del` **does not delete objects**. This is *crucial to understand**. Python is a memory managed language, and gives you no way to delete an object. – juanpa.arrivillaga May 14 '23 at 20:45

Deleting all objects by substring

0 Answers0