An equivalent to string.ascii_letters for unicode strings in python 2.x?

Question

In the \"string\" module of the standard library,

string.ascii_letters ## Same as string.ascii_lowercase + string.ascii_uppercase

is

Answer 1

There's no string, but you can check whether a character is a letter using the unicodedata module, in particular its category() function.

>>> unicodedata.category(u'a')
'Ll'
>>> unicodedata.category(u'A')
'Lu'
>>> unicodedata.category(u'5')
'Nd'
>>> unicodedata.category(u'ф') # Cyrillic f.
'Ll'
>>> unicodedata.category(u'٢') # Arabic-indic numeral for 2.
'Nd'

Ll means "letter, lowercase". Lu means "letter, uppercase". Nd means "numeric, digit".