I can't see the forest through the trees.
I have stored 3 global variables in a dictionary, and associated each
variable with a filename.
Ideally, I want to read the contents of the text files, and store the
contents in the global variables. The globals will be used by another
function.
However, when I do the assignment to varname = fh.readlines(), a new
variable is created, and the reference to the global variable is
overwritten, because the contents of the files are strings, and strings are
immutable.
I see the problem, but not a good solution.
var1=""
var2=""
var3=""
def initGlobals():
global var1, var2, var3
fileDict = {'var1.txt':var1, 'var2.txt':var2, 'var3.txt':var3}
for fn, varname in fileDict.iteritems():
try:
try:
fh=open(fn, 'r')
#id(varname) # at this point, this id matches the id of the
global variable
varname = fh.readlines() # this creates a new variable, but
I want to store the file contents in the global var
#id(varname) # this is a new id, the global
var is not updated
fh.close()
except IOError:
print "\nFATAL ERROR occurred reading %s\n" % fn
finally:
fh.close()
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