List of alphabet letters in Python

Question

Hi. Two questions:

1) Is it possible to have/use list of letters (alphabet) in any shorter way then listed them as I usually see here in many codes:

letters = ['a', 'b', 'c', ... 'y', 'z']?

Something similar (or not) like range for numbers: range(1, 26) or in regex [a-z].

2) If there is a shorter or simpler way why do you use a "traditional" list of alphabet letters so often?

Answer 1

#I wont say its faster or better, but here is another way.

a=ord('a')
alph=[chr(i) for i in range(a,a+26)]

Answer 2

Wow! And other string module data:

ascii_letters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

ascii_lowercase = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

ascii_uppercase = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

digits = '0123456789'

hexdigits = '0123456789abcdefABCDEF'

octdigits = '01234567'

printable = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'

punctuation = '!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'

whitespace = ' \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'

Answer 3

I have found soething like that too:

spam = list(map(chr, range(97, 123)))

eggs = list(map(chr, range(ord('a'), ord('z')+1)))

Answer 4

Impatient... It took me a while longer to find the answer in the Internet. When importing string module we can use e.g.:

import string
eggs = list(string.ascii_lowercase)

But the second question has been still waiting for the answer. Is it a "good practice" or just simpler or faster (for code) using it this or that way?

Answer 5

The second method is certainly more Pythonic. Even if one of them is faster, the margin should be negligible.

Answer 6

Here is an easy way using comprehension:

letters=[chr(x+97) for x in range(26)]

Answer 7

>>> import string
>>> list(string.ascii_lowercase)
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

If you want more details, you can check here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16060899/alphabet-range-in-JUMP_LINK__&&__python__&&__JUMP_LINK