String interpolation question

[Fernando Pérez]

Hi group,

I have a string interpolation problem and can't seem to find a clean solution.

Suppose I have a list and an index:

y=[5,6]
i=1

I want to print y[i]. The following fails:

print '%(y[%(i)s])s' % locals()

as does the simpler

print '%(y[%(i)s])s' % locals()

Obviously this works:

print '%s' % y[i]

but I don't want that because in my real problem, the string is long and I 
don't want the dangers of positionally matched %s arguments.

By the way, Itpl interpolation here also crashes:

printpl('$y[$i]')

gives an exception.

I know that pep215 never gets anywhere everytime it gets pushed, but I 
_really_ feel that string interpolation is about the only place where python 
simply sucks (IMHO ;) I keep running into situations where the only solutions 
that work are either kludgy or require way too much work to be clean.

Thanks for any help,

f.