Duh! how dumb am I? A dictionary solves all those problems, with each entry named, and the value of each name could be a class instace. plus all the class instances can be iterated by a loop.
Thanks Piet & Alex for your guidance! -Dave "Piet van Oostrum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>>>>> "Dave Rose" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (DR) wrote: > >>DR> Hello all. >>DR> I was wondering if creating classes could be dynamic. I want to know >>DR> if I can make a class Person, then read in a list of names (say >>DR> people's names) so then I can have a class instance created for each >>DR> name in the list? > > If you have the class Person, you are not creating it dynamically. And of > course you can create instances dynamically as you describe. > >>DR> Why do I want to do this? I was just thinking if I had a name on >>the >>DR> list, Dave, I could then be able to read the name in the list, and >>DR> assign Maria.birthday = <> and all the other attributes I would want >>DR> to use a class for, except this is dynamic. I don't know how to >>DR> iterate thru the list to assign the different attributes yet, but this >>DR> seemed reasonable to want to do, and thought I could learn from this. > > If I understand you correctly, you want to create a variable with name > 'Maria' when you read the name "Maria". Creating variables dynamically is > possible in Python but is almost always the wrong thing to do. Instead it > is usually better to use a dictionary. > > class Person: > def __init__(self, name): > self.name = name > > persons = {} > > now you have a loop that reads persons' names, say in name. > > myperson = persons[name] = Person(name) > > Now I suppose you want to read additional attributes, while the list of > possible attributes is in principle open. > > So suppose you have read the attribute name in attr and the value in val. > The you can dynamically create an instance attribute with: > > setattr(myperson, attr, val) > -- > Piet van Oostrum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4] > Private email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
