How to programmatically set a global (module) variable?

Question

I would like to define globals in a "programmatic" way. Something similar to what I want to do would be:

definitions = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 123.4} for definition in definitions.items():     exec("%s = %r" % definition)  # a = 1, etc. 

Specifically, I want to create a module fundamentalconstants that contains variables that can be accessed as fundamentalconstants.electron_mass, etc., where all values are obtained through parsing a file (hence the need to do the assignments in a "programmatic" way).

Now, the exec solution above would work. But I am a little bit uneasy with it, because I'm afraid that exec is not the cleanest way to achieve the goal of setting module globals.

Answer 1

Here is a better way to do it:

import sys definitions = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 123.4} module = sys.modules[__name__] for name, value in definitions.iteritems():     setattr(module, name, value) 

Answer 2

You can set globals in the dictionary returned by globals():

definitions = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 123.4} for name, value in definitions.items():     globals()[name] = value