Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

exec, eval, and compile

Python provides the following three built-in functions to manually execute, evaluate, and compile arbitrary Python code:

• exec(object, globals, locals): This allows you to dynamically execute the Python code. object should be a string or code object (see the compile() function) representing a single statement or sequence of multiple statements. The globals and locals arguments provide global and local namespaces for the executed code and are optional. If they are not provided, then the code is executed in the current scope. If provided, globals must be a dictionary, while locals might be any mapping object; it always returns None.
• eval(expression, globals, locals): This is used to evaluate the given expression by returning ...