Transfer of symbols between contexts

Question

As many others (I guess) I'm struggling with the handling of contexts within Mathematica. I'm working on a new package definition with the usual syntaxt specified by the Mathematica documentation:

BeginPackage["example`"];

<Entry Points>

Begin["`Private`"]

<Definitions>

End[];

EndPackage[];

Now I want to use symbols generated in another Notebook and saved with DumpSave for efficiency. The code in this other Notebook is thus

DumpSave[<some mx file>,{symbol1,symbol2,...,symboln}]

when I import these symbols into my package it looks like this:

BeginPackage["example`"];

<Entry Points>

Begin["`Private`"]

DumpGet[<some mx file>];
<Definitions>

End[];

EndPackage[];

there is already the catch: The Symbols are not automatically loaded into the private context of the package (which is examplePrivate in the above code snippet) but into the original context of the Notebook where the mx file has been generated (which is Global` in my case)! Thus I need to convert the symbols either into the private context in the package definition (which would the following statements

example`Private`symbol1=Global`symbol1;
example`Private`symbol2=Global`symbol2;
.
.
.
example`Private`symboln=Global`symboln;
Remove[Global`symbol1,Global`symbol2,...,Global`symboln])

or save the symbols already into the right context by using

example`Private`symbol1=symbol1;
example`Private`symbol2=symbol2;
.
.
.
example`Private`symboln=symboln;
DumpSave[<some mx file>,{example`Private`symbol1, example`Private`symbol2, 
  ..., example`Private`symboln}]

in the generating Notebook (which would be my preferred solution). I need to do all of this clumsy setup because I do not want to have the symbols in the Global` context because then the symbols are visible outside of the package, which is not necessary and may cause shadowing problems too. Now my question: Is there a quick way to copy symbols over from one context into another? Something like

Set[Evaluate[example`Private`#],Global`#]&/@{symbol1,symbol2,...,symboln}

would be preferrable. However above statement does not work...

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I solved my problem now differently. According to my last comment to my question I now just save the interpolation statements within the package into an mx file

DropFileExtension[datafile_] :=StringJoin[Riffle[Most[StringSplit[datafile, "."]], "."]];
DumpMX[datafile_, symbol_: dummy] := Module[{filename},
  filename =DropFileExtension[datafile] <> "_" 
    <>StringReplace[$System, " " -> ""] <> "_" 
    <> ToString[NumberForm[$VersionNumber, {2, 1}]] <> ".mx";
  If[! MatchQ[FindFile[filename], $Failed], 
    DeleteFile[filename]];(*Delete File if it is already existing*)
    symbol = ReadMX[datafile, True];
    DumpSave[filename, symbol];
  ];

ReadMX::MXFileError = "MX file `1` of optical database not found.";
ReadMX[datafile_, symbol_: dummy] := Module[{filename, fields},
 filename = DropFileExtension[datafile] <> "_" 
   <> StringReplace[$System, " " -> ""] <> "_" 
   <> ToString[NumberForm[$VersionNumber, {2, 1}]] <> ".mx";
 If[MatchQ[FindFile[filename], $Failed], 
   Message[ReadMX::MXFileError, filename], Import[filename]];
 Return[symbol];
 ];
]

Any symbol (defined default globally as dummy) is saved into an MX file including the System and Mathematica Version information (since the binary MX file is not transferrable between different systems and versions) in the name.

DumpMX["test.mx",dummy]

and can be read by

ReadMX["test.mx",dummy]

.