Alphabet Range on Python

Question

Instead of making a list of alphabet like this:

alpha = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'.........'z']

Is there any way that we can group it to a range or something? For example, for numbers it can be grouped using range()

range(1, 10)

Answer 1

>>> import string
>>> string.ascii_lowercase
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

If you really need a list:

>>> 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']

And to do it with range

>>> list(map(chr, range(97, 123))) #or list(map(chr, range(ord('a'), ord('z')+1)))
['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']

Other helpful string module features:

>>> help(string) # on Python 3
....
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 2

[chr(i) for i in range(ord('a'),ord('z')+1)]

Answer 3

In Python 2.7 and 3 you can use this:

import string
string.ascii_lowercase
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

string.ascii_uppercase
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

As @Zaz says: string.lowercase is deprecated and no longer works in Python 3 but string.ascii_lowercase works in both

Answer 4

Here is a simple letter-range implementation:

Code

def letter_range(start, stop="{", step=1):
    """Yield a range of lowercase letters.""" 
    for ord_ in range(ord(start.lower()), ord(stop.lower()), step):
        yield chr(ord_)

Demo

list(letter_range("a", "f"))
# ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

list(letter_range("a", "f", step=2))
# ['a', 'c', 'e']

Answer 5

If you are looking to an equivalent of letters[1:10] from R, you can use:

 import string
 list(string.ascii_lowercase[0:10])