How to import a bunch of local variables into a dict by name

Here's a cool little function I wrote:

def _vars2dict(vars, *vars_wanted):
vars_wanted = set(vars_wanted)
return dict(filter(lambda i: i[0] in vars_wanted, vars.iteritems()))

Call it with locals(), and any subsequent variables passed to it will be returned in a dict by name.

Here's an example, using a variable we create and a built-in function

>>> x =1
>>> _vars2dict(locals(), 'log', 'x')
{'x': 1, 'log': }

This is useful if you have a lot of local variables that you want to interpolate into a string using the more intelligible dict format rather than the tuple format.