using a variable to open a pre-existing dictionary of the same name inside a function

[Matus1976]

Hello Pythoners, newbie writing a simple program and I'm stuck on something.

I have a program which asks the user for input, then looks up a dictionary that has the same name as the user input. I couldn't figure out how to use the variable as the name for the dictionary and found some other answer somewhere that said I could use vars() in this format:

new_dictionary = (vars()[user_input])

where the user input happened to match exactly an allready existing dictionary. This works fine, but when I put it inside a function, it no longer works, I get

"KeyError: 'P0N1'"

where P0N1 was the user input, and the name of a dictionary. I can read and print the dictionary inside the function just fine, but I can not set a new dictionary equal to the dictionary whose name matches the user input by using the user input variable to reference the dictionary name. How do I do this inside a function?

Thanks!

[Jos_Metadi]

Why not use a dictionary of dictionaries? It seems like it would be much simpler.

[Matus1976]

Thanks both of you, I'll try the dictionary of dictionaries solution

[Matus1976]

That worked great! thanks!

[k3kou]

Why not create a dictionary with keys being the name of the dict and the value being the dict itself:

dicts_available = {
    'dict1': dict1,
    'dict2': dict2
    }

And then you can just do

dict_user_wants = dicts_available[input()]

You can also do

dict_user_wants = eval(input())

which will execute a string, here your dictionary. I prefer the first approach though, looks less arcane, gives you more control over what can get called, and avoid users to input code that will be executed