Problem with exec

Antoon Pardon apardon at forel.vub.ac.be
Fri Dec 16 09:56:06 EST 2005


Op 2005-12-16, Peter Otten schreef <__peter__ at web.de>:
> Antoon Pardon wrote:
>
>> I have the following little piece of code:
>> 
>> class Cfg:pass
>> #config = Cfg()
>> 
>> def assign():
>>   setattr(config, 'Start' , [13, 26, 29, 34])
>> 
>> def foo():
>>   config = Cfg()
>>   dct = {'config':config, 'assign':assign}
>>   exec "assign()" in dct
>>   print config.Start
>> 
>> foo()
>> 
>> 
>> When I execute this I get the following error:
>> 
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "mod1.py", line 13, in ?
>>     foo()
>>   File "mod1.py", line 10, in foo
>>     exec "assign()" in dct
>>   File "<string>", line 1, in ?
>>   File "mod1.py", line 5, in assign
>>     setattr(config, 'Start' , [13, 26, 29, 34])
>> NameError: global name 'config' is not defined
>> 
>> Now I don't understand this. In the documentation I read the following:
>> 
>>   If only the first expression after in is specified, it should be a
>>   dictionary, which will be used for both the global and the local
>>   variables.
>> 
>> I provided a dictionary to be used for the global variables and it
>> contains a 'config' entry, so why doesn't this work?
>
>
> If you have a module
>
> v = 42
> def f(): return v
>
>
> and call f in another module
>
> print f()
>
> where no global variable v is defined, would you expect that call to fail?
> Of course not, but how can f look up the variable v then?

But I am not just calling. I'm using exec. And from the documentation
from exec I get the impression you can use it so that a function
will have temporarily a different reference to global namespace.

-- 
Antoon Pardon



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