compile() question

[afabbro]

I am parsing a stream of colon-delimited fields (field:value) where
the field is an attribute for an object.  Since there are a few dozen
fields and I don't want to handle each field separately, I used exec
to make it easy (after splitting):

  exec ( 'volume.' + field + ' = "' + value + '"' )

which means the exec'd python code is something like:

  volume.barcode = 'T00123'

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of data to process and I'd like to speed
it up.  I'm thinking that I could possible compile() the command ahead
of time?  Unfortunately, I can't find a decent example of what I want
to do anywhere (-Learning Perl-, the Python docs, etc.)  I'm new to
Python and am wondering how I can pass variables into a compile() so
that everytime I exec it, it does the substitution?

Thanks!

- andrew fabbro
  afabbro at indoctrination.com