Creating a new Symbol from two strings with a point

General Usage
6

You can lookup the fieldtype in MyType and parse it as that

mutable struct MyType
    a::Int
    b::Float64
end

function foo!(B::MyType)
    vars = ["a = 10"  
            "b = 2.0"] # from data file
    for line in vars
        var, val = strip.(split(line, "="))
        sym = Symbol(var)
        T = fieldtype(MyType, sym)
        setproperty!(B, sym, parse(T, val))
    end
end


julia> B = MyType(1, 2.0)
MyType(1, 2.0)

julia> foo!(B)

julia> B
MyType(10, 2.0)

The question here is, what subset of the full Julia language do you want to support. If it is the full Julia language then obviously you are going to need a Julia parser at some point, but if you just want to set some numbers and strings, invoking the Julia parser is overkill and can lead to security problems.