Can you use a string to instantiate a class?

If you wanted to avoid an eval(), you could just do:

id = "1234asdf"
constructor = globals()[id]
instance = constructor()

Provided that the class is defined in (or imported into) your current scope.

Not sure this is what you want but it seems like a more Pythonic way to instantiate a bunch of classes listed in a string:

class idClasses:
    class ID12345:pass
    class ID01234:pass
# could also be: import idClasses

class ProcessDirector:
    def __init__(self):
        self.allClasses = []

    def construct(self, builderName):
        targetClass = getattr(idClasses, builderName)
        instance = targetClass()
        self.allClasses.append(instance)

IDS = ["ID12345", "ID01234"]

director = ProcessDirector()
for id in IDS:
    director.construct(id)

print director.allClasses
# [<__main__.ID12345 instance at 0x7d850>, <__main__.ID01234 instance at 0x7d918>]