Using loops in python to generate variable

The more pythonic way to do it would be to either do it as a list:

vals = [] for search_result in search_results: vals.append(Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name,urlparse(search_result).netloc.encode('utf-8'))) # Access via vals[0], vals[1], etc. 

or as a dictionary:

vals = {} for search_result in search_results: vals[search_result] = Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name,urlparse(search_result).netloc.encode('utf-8')) # Access via vals[search_result1], vals[search_result2], etc. 

If you HAD to be bad about it, you could do:

for i in xrange(10): search_result = locals()['search_result' + str(i)] locals()['v' + str(i)] = Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name,urlparse(search_result).netloc.encode('utf-8')) # Accessed via v0, v1, v2, etc. 

But I would recommend against it because it is non-pythonic and more obtuse than the above solutions.

This would be easy if you represented your values as collections. Code structure mirrors data structure; when your data is distributed over unrelated variables, your code is too.

vs = [Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name, urlparse(search_result).netloc.encode('utf-8')) for search_result in search_results] 

You can use a list like so:

lst = [] for search_result in search_results: lst.append( Levenshtein.jaro_winkler( exhibitor_name, urlparse(search_results).netloc.encode('utf-8'))) 

This assumes that you also used a list, search_results instead of all of the indivdual search_resultN variables.

You can use locals() to get a dict that contains the variable names as keys and their contents as values. In this way, you can access the search_result* variables programmatically, instead of typing their names out.

You could then push a new entry into locals() for the v* variable names, but why pollute the local namespace with them? They are all related to each other, so placing them into a dictionary with keys v1 through v10 keeps them together in a useful way.

apply_Levenshtein = lambda x: ( Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name,urlparse(x).netloc.encode('utf-8')) ) variables = { "v{}".format(i):apply_Levenshtein(locals()["search_result{}".format(i)]) for i in range(1, 11) } 

Now variables["v1"] will be

Levenshtein.jaro_winkler(exhibitor_name,urlparse(search_result1).netloc.encode('utf-8'))`. 

Better still would be to ensure that the search_result* variables exist in a dict or a list from the beginning, so that you don't need to use locals() at all.