Simpler way to create dictionary of separate variables?

Question

I would like to be able to get the name of a variable as a string but I don\'t know if Python has that much introspection capabilities. Something like:

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Answer 1

I wrote a neat little useful function based on the answer to this question. I'm putting it here in case it's useful.

def what(obj, callingLocals=locals()):
    """
    quick function to print name of input and value. 
    If not for the default-Valued callingLocals, the function would always
    get the name as "obj", which is not what I want.    
    """
    for k, v in list(callingLocals.items()):
         if v is obj:
            name = k
    print(name, "=", obj)

usage:

>> a = 4
>> what(a)
a = 4
>>|