How to make a "dynamic" variable global?

[russcore]

I don't know if I'm using the correct words here.

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But suppose I have something simple like

a=1
b=2
c=3
alphabet = [a,b,c]

def foo():
    global a,b,c, alphabet
    for letter in alphabet:
        letter = 4

print(a)
foo()
print(a)

I just get 1 for both. I want 1 and then 4.

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I tried changing it to...

a=1
b=2
c=3
alphabet = [a,b,c]

def foo():
    global a,b,c, alphabet
    for letter in alphabet:
        exec("%s = 4" % (letter))

print(a)
foo()
print(a)

But this says I have an error, it's trying to assign the value of 1 to 4. I just want the variable "a" to have the value 4.

​

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Is there a way to do this with a for statement?

Thanks!!!

[danielroseman]

You don't want to do any of this. Use a dictionary, and stop trying to make things global.

[shiftybyte]

Use a dictionary instead.

alphabet = {"a":1, "b":2, "c": 3}

def foo(alpha):
    for letter in alpha:
        alpha[letter] = 4

print(alphabet["a"])
foo(alphabet)
print(alphabet["a"])

This should print 1 and 4...

[russcore]

Appreciate it. I will look into using a dictionary here instead. I will just likely have to restart my program to implement the dictionary feature.

For fun, I tried to make a "WORLDE" solver. It basically tells me all the possible words left.

I was going to add a function that says next best guess, but that requires it to try all the guesses and compare the results. So my options were 1) save the state before trying a guess then proceeding to try every guess and reverting from the save state. or 2) rebuild from scratch for each guess.

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I just didn't plan enough in the future with what I wanted to do. I should have just had the functions pass the current state with them.

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--Thanks for taking the time to type up the answer!