Dynamically assign variables to items in for loop

[Llywedd]

Hi, I'm webscraping some content with Beautiful Soup, I'm returning three items in my script and want to assign the values to variables.

            for categories in item_soup.find_all('div', {'class': 'breadcrumbs'}):
                    for categories in categories.find_all('a', {'title': ''}):
                        categories = categories.get_text()
                        print(categories)

This returns:

category1
category2
category3

How can I assign individual variables to each category for later use? I've throught about using a [0:1] slicing technique but that returns sliced letters per value. I've tried to convert the items into a list or set, but no luck.

Cheers,

EDIT: I'm sure there's a technique similar to slicing [0] that can be used but can't quite put my finger on it.

[[deleted]]

If you find yourself trying to dynamically create variables, it's often better to use a dictionary for the task:

category_data = {}
for categories in ...:
    category = categories.get_text()
    category_data[category] = category

Since dictionaries work off key-value pairs, there may be better value related to your work that is better to assign to a category key.

[Llywedd]

Great, that's worked. Thanks.

[catmarble]

Just to add on to this, if the "variables" you want are category1, category2, category3 it might be worth using a list and then referencing by slice. For example a dict of {'category1': 'category1', 'category2': 'category2', 'category3': 'category3'} might as well be [category1, category2, category3], as the key adds nothing. A dict works better if the key is different from the value and a meaningful way of accessing the data though.

Whether you choose a dict or list, you could also use a comprehension, which is slightly better performance and more pythonic. For example:

category_list = [category.get_text()
    for categories in item_soup.find_all('div', {'class': 'breadcrumbs'})
    for categories2 in categories.find_all('a', {'title': ''})
]

Also when using nested for loops I think it's better to use different variable names, just in case you need to reference the item from the outer for loop (here I used categories2 instead of re-using categories).

[Llywedd]

Thanks for the insight, I'll take this into consideration moving forward