- How to Make a List of the Alphabet in Python
- Using the string Module to Make a Python List of the Alphabet
- Using Map to Make a Python List of the Alphabet
- Conclusion
- Additional Resources
- All characters python
- Answer by Mekhi Huff
- Answer by Everleigh Rivas
- Answer by Tessa Lang
- Example 1: Working of isprintable()
- Example 2: How to use isprintable()?
- Answer by Malani Tran
- Answer by Adler White
- Python String to List of Characters
- Method 1: Using Indexing “[ ]” Brackets
- Method 2: Using the for-in Loop
- Method 3: Using the list() Method
- Method 4: Using the extend() Method
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Abdul Mannan
How to Make a List of the Alphabet in Python
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Python to make a list of the entire alphabet. This can be quite useful when you’re working on interview assignments or in programming competitions. You’ll learn how to use the string module in order to generate a list of either and both the entire lower and upper case of the ASCII alphabet. You’ll also learn some naive implementations that rely on the ord() and chr() functions.
Using the string Module to Make a Python List of the Alphabet
The simplest and, perhaps, most intuitive way to generate a list of all the characters in the alphabet is by using the string module. The string module is part of the standard Python library, meaning you don’t need to install anything. The easiest way to load a list of all the letters of the alphabet is to use the string.ascii_letters , string.ascii_lowercase , and string.ascii_uppercase instances.
As the names describe, these instances return the lower and upper cases alphabets, the lower case alphabet, and the upper case alphabet, respectively. The values are fixed and aren’t locale-dependent, meaning that they return the same values, regardless of the locale that you set.
Let’s take a look at how we can load the lower case alphabet in Python using the string module:
# Loading the lowercase alphabet to a list import string alphabet = list(string.ascii_lowercase) print(alphabet) # Returns: ['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']
Let’s break down how this works:
- We import the string module
- We then instantiate a new variable, alphabet , which uses the string.ascii_lowercase instance.
- This returns a single string containing all the letters of the alphabet
- We then pass this into the list() function, which converts each letter into a single string in the list
The table below shows the types of lists you can generate using the three methods:
We can see that we evaluate an expression for each item in an iterable. In order to do this, we can iterate over the range object between 97 and 122 to generate a list of the alphabet. Let’s give this a shot!
# Generate a list of the alphabet in Python with a list comprehensions alphabet = [chr(value) for value in range(97, 123)] print(alphabet) # Returns: ['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']
While our for loop wasn’t very complicated, converting it into a list comprehension makes it significantly easier to read! We can also convert our more dynamic version into a list comprehension, as show below:
# Generate a list of the alphabet in Python with a list comprehension alphabet = [chr(value) for value in range(ord('a'), ord('a') + 26)] print(alphabet) # Returns: ['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']
In the final section, you’ll learn how to use the map() function to generate a list of the alphabet in Python.
Using Map to Make a Python List of the Alphabet
In this section, you’ll make use of the map() function in order to generate the alphabet. The map function applies a function to each item in an iterable. Because of this, we can map the chr function to each item in the range covering the letters of the alphabet. The benefit of this approach is increased readability by being able to indicate simply what action is being taken on each item in an iterable.
Let’s see what this code looks like:
# Generate a list of the alphabet in Python with map and chr alphabet = list(map(chr, range(97, 123))) print(alphabet) # Returns: ['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']
Here, we use the map() function and pass in the chr function to be mapped to each item in the range() covering 97 through 123. Because the map() function returns a map object, we need to convert it to a list by using the list() function.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learned a number of ways to make a list of the alphabet in Python. You learned how to use instances from the string module, which covers lowercase and uppercase characters. You also learned how to make use of the chr() and ord() functions to convert between Unicode and integer values. You learned how to use these functions in conjunction with a for loop, a list comprehension, and the map() function.
Additional Resources
To learn more about related topics, check out the articles listed below:
All characters python
ASCII defines 128 characters whose byte values range from 0 to 127 inclusive. So to get a string of all the ASCII characters, you could just do,All printable ASCII characters:,For every single character defined in the ASCII standard, use chr:,Only 100 of those are considered printable. The printable ASCII characters can be accessed via
All ASCII capital letters:
>>> import string >>> string.ascii_uppercase 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> string.printable '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;?@[\\]^_`<|>~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'
For every single character defined in the ASCII standard, use chr :
>>> ''.join(chr(i) for i in range(128)) '\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f !"#$%&\'()*+,-./0123456789:;[email protected][\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz<|>~\x7f'
Answer by Mekhi Huff
Initialize an empty string at the beginning. Traverse in the list of characters, for every index add character to the initial string. After complete traversal, print the string which has been added with every character.,The list of characters can be joined easily by initializing str=”” so that there are no spaces in between.,Python | Convert a list of characters into a string,Given a list of characters, merge all of them into a string.
Input : ['g', 'e', 'e', 'k', 's', 'f', 'o', 'r', 'g', 'e', 'e', 'k', 's'] Output : geeksforgeeks Input : ['p', 'r', 'o', 'g', 'r', 'a', 'm', 'm', 'i', 'n', 'g'] Output : programming
By using join() function in python, all characters in the list can be joined. The syntax is:
str = "" str1 = ( "geeks", "for", "geeks" ) str.join(str1)
Answer by Everleigh Rivas
Get Python Cookbook now with O’Reilly online learning.,And here is a tricky variant that relies on functionality also available in 2.0: ,You need to check for the occurrence of any of a set of characters in a string. ,Fortunately, this rather tricky approach lacks an immediately obvious variant applicable to implement containsAny. However, one last tricky scheme, based on string.translate’s ability to delete all characters in a set, does apply to both functions:
def containsAny(str, set): """ Check whether sequence str contains ANY of the items in set. """ return 1 in [c in str for c in set] def containsAll(str, set): """ Check whether sequence str contains ALL of the items in set. """ return 0 not in [c in str for c in set]
Answer by Tessa Lang
The isprintable() methods returns True if all characters in the string are printable or the string is empty. If not, it returns False.,True if the string is empty or all characters in the string are printable,False if the string contains at least one non-printable character,The isprintable() method returns:
The syntax of isprintable() is:
Example 1: Working of isprintable()
s = 'Space is a printable' print(s) print(s.isprintable()) s = '\nNew Line is printable' print(s) print(s.isprintable()) s = '' print('\nEmpty string printable?', s.isprintable())
Space is a printable True New Line is printable False Empty string printable? True
Example 2: How to use isprintable()?
# written using ASCII # chr(27) is escape character # char(97) is letter 'a' s = chr(27) + chr(97) if s.isprintable() == True: print('Printable') else: print('Not Printable') s = '2+2 = 4' if s.isprintable() == True: print('Printable') else: print('Not Printable')
Answer by Malani Tran
A non-normative HTML file listing all valid identifier characters for Unicode 4.1 can be found at https://www.unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/DerivedCoreProperties.txt,If an encoding is declared, the encoding name must be recognized by Python. The encoding is used for all lexical analysis, including string literals, comments and identifiers.,Formatted string literals cannot be used as docstrings, even if they do not include expressions.,All identifiers are converted into the normal form NFKC while parsing; comparison of identifiers is based on NFKC.
Answer by Adler White
string='mississippi' s='s' lst= [] for i in range(len(string)): if (string[i] == s): lst.append(i) print(lst) #result: [2, 3, 5, 6]
Python String to List of Characters
In Python, strings are considered lists of characters, but even then they are not formatted and used in the same way as lists. Now, being a programmer requires you to be able to work with strings, characters, lists, and more. With that said, there are multiple ways in Python to convert a Python String into a list of characters. This post will list down all of the methods that can be used to achieve this feat.
Therefore, let’s begin with the first method which is to use the indexing brackets.
Method 1: Using Indexing “[ ]” Brackets
As mentioned above, strings are considered a list of characters. This means that the strings can be accessed using the string indexing brackets. Similarly, to lists, strings also have indexes starting from zero.
To use indexing brackets to turn a string into a list, you need to use the append() method. To demonstrate this, start by creating a string variable with a specific string value such as:
Now, you can access each individual character by using the index and place them inside a list by using the append method:
listVar.append ( stringVar [ 0 ] )
listVar.append ( stringVar [ 6 ] )
listVar.append ( stringVar [ 9 ] )
Lastly, simply call the print() function and print out the listVar onto the terminal:
When this program is executed, it prints the following content of the list “listVar” onto the terminal:
The output verifies that the string has been converted into a list of characters.
Method 2: Using the for-in Loop
The first method relies on the manual selection of characters to be placed inside the list, and if the user wants to convert every character of a string into a list then it is not an optimal approach. To achieve this feat, the user can utilize the for-in loop to iterate through each and every character of the string and append it into a list.
Let’s demonstrate this by first creating a string and an empty list using the following lines of code:
After that, simply use the for-in loop over the variable “stringVar” and append every character using the append() method:
At the end, simply print out the entire list using the print() method:
When this code is executed, it produces the following output on the terminal:
The output verifies that the entire string has been converted into a list of characters.
Method 3: Using the list() Method
In Python, the list() method can be used to convert an entire string into a list object. To do this, the user has to simply call the list() method and pass the string as an argument. To illustrate this, take the following code snippet:
When the above code is executed, it produces the following outcome on the terminal:
From the output, it is observable that the entire string has been converted into a list of characters using the list() method.
Method 4: Using the extend() Method
The extend() method is to extend a list and it is very similar to append(). The extend() method can take in a string as its input and each individual character of the string will be appended to the list. To demonstrate this, take the following code snippet:
When this above code is executed, it produces the following results:
The output confirms that the entire string has been converted into a list of characters.
Conclusion
To convert a string into a list of characters, the user can use the indexing brackets “[ ]” along with the append() method to add either individual characters or the entire string to the list. Apart from this, the user can utilize the built-in methods list() and extend() to convert an entire string into a list of characters. This post has elaborated on these methods in detail.
About the author
Abdul Mannan
I am curious about technology and writing and exploring it is my passion. I am interested in learning new skills and improving my knowledge and I hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science.