On my prior post Jon and Jignesh both made the comment that using locals() in string substitution provides for easier to read code – and is a great recommendation. What locals() does is grab the object from the local environment, so in your string if you place %(MyObject)s, and in the prior part of your code you have MyObject = "foo", it will substitute foo into the string. Using the same prior code, here is an example:

BEGIN PROGRAM Python.

var = ["V1","V2","V3"]
lab = ["Var 1","Var 2","Var 3"]

for v,l in zip(var,lab):
  spss.Submit("""
*Descriptive statistics.
FREQ %(v)s.
CORRELATIONS /VARIABLES=X1 X2 X3 %(v)s.
*Graph 1.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X1 WITH %(v)s /TITLE = "%(l)s".
*Graph 2.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X2 WITH %(v)s /TITLE = "%(l)s".
*Graph 3.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X3 WITH %(v)s /TITLE = "%(l)s".
""" % (locals()))

END PROGRAM.

This ends up working in a similar fashion to the dictionary substitution I mentioned, just that Python makes the dictionary for you. Here is the same prior example using the dictionary with % substitution:

BEGIN PROGRAM Python.

var = ["V1","V2","V3"]
lab = ["Var 1","Var 2","Var 3"]

MyDict = {"a":v, "b":l}

for v,l in zip(var,lab):
  spss.Submit("""
*Descriptive statistics.
FREQ %(a)s.
CORRELATIONS /VARIABLES=X1 X2 X3 %(a)s.
*Graph 1.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X1 WITH %(a)s /TITLE = "%(b)s".
*Graph 2.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X2 WITH %(a)s /TITLE = "%(b)s".
*Graph 3.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X3 WITH %(a)s /TITLE = "%(b)s".
""" % (MyDict) )

END PROGRAM.

And finally here is this example using a string template. It is basically self-explanatory.

*Using a string template.
BEGIN PROGRAM Python.
from string import Template

#Making template
c = Template("""*Descriptive statistics.
FREQ $var.
CORRELATIONS /VARIABLES=X1 X2 X3 $var.
*Graph 1.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X1 WITH $var /TITLE = "$lab".
*Graph 2.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X2 WITH $var /TITLE = "$lab".
*Graph 3.
GRAPH /SCATTERPLOT(BIVAR)=X3 WITH $var /TITLE = "$lab".
""")

#now looping over variables and labels
var = ["V1","V2","V3"]
lab = ["Var 1","Var 2","Var 3"]
for v,l in zip(var,lab):
  spss.Submit(c.substitute(var=v,lab=l))
END PROGRAM.

The template solution is nice because it can make the code a bit more modular (i.e. you don’t have huge code blocks within a loop). The only annoyance I can see with this is that $ does come up in SPSS code on occasion with the few system defined variables, so it needs to be escaped with a second $.