Automatically Generate A List With The English Alphabet In Python

TODO: Combine with: 264g8rgi1kbj which shows how to get a subset of letters.

TODO: Setup a function where you can pass a letter and a number of letters to add and produce a list from that. ---

Sometimes you want to get your hands on all the letters in the english alphabet. Here's how:

** Lowercase

You can generate a list of with the full alphabet of lowercase english letters using:

Code

import string

  alphabet_lowercase = list(string.ascii_lowercase)

  print(alphabet_lowercase)

Results

['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']

** Uppercase

Uppercase letters can be had with:

Code

import string

  alphabet_uppercase = list(string.ascii_uppercase)

  print(alphabet_uppercase)

Results

['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']

** How It Works

The `string.ascii_lowercase` and `string.ascii_uppercase` calls each return single strings with their correspondingly cased alphabets. That is, `abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz` and `ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ`, respectively.

Wrapping a string in `list()` splits each character out individually and returns it as a separate item in a list.

So, calling `list(string.ascii_lowercase)` is equivalent to calling `list('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')` which does the split and generates our list `['a', 'b', 'c', ...etc ]`

`string.ascii_lowercase` and `string.ascii_uppercase` are "String Constants". Basically, built-in stuff that does't change (even if the locale does TKTKTKT note what locale is).

There are a few other String Constants for digits and punctuation that you can <a href="https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html">check out in the docs</a>.