Simpler way to create dictionary of separate variables?

As unwind said, this isn't really something you do in Python - variables are actually name mappings to objects.

However, here's one way to try and do it:

 >>> a = 1
 >>> for k, v in list(locals().iteritems()):
         if v is a:
             a_as_str = k
 >>> a_as_str
 a
 >>> type(a_as_str)
 'str'

Are you trying to do this?

dict( (name,eval(name)) for name in ['some','list','of','vars'] )

Example

>>> some= 1
>>> list= 2
>>> of= 3
>>> vars= 4
>>> dict( (name,eval(name)) for name in ['some','list','of','vars'] )
{'list': 2, 'some': 1, 'vars': 4, 'of': 3}

This is a hack. It will not work on all Python implementations distributions (in particular, those that do not have traceback.extract_stack.)

import traceback

def make_dict(*expr):
    (filename,line_number,function_name,text)=traceback.extract_stack()[-2]
    begin=text.find('make_dict(')+len('make_dict(')
    end=text.find(')',begin)
    text=[name.strip() for name in text[begin:end].split(',')]
    return dict(zip(text,expr))

bar=True
foo=False
print(make_dict(bar,foo))
# {'foo': False, 'bar': True}

Note that this hack is fragile:

make_dict(bar,
          foo)

(calling make_dict on 2 lines) will not work.

Instead of trying to generate the dict out of the values foo and bar, it would be much more Pythonic to generate the dict out of the string variable names 'foo' and 'bar':

dict([(name,locals()[name]) for name in ('foo','bar')])

This is not possible in Python, which really doesn't have "variables". Python has names, and there can be more than one name for the same object.