Automatically Generate A List With The English Alphabet In Python

March - 2022

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:

import string

alphabet_lowercase = list(string.ascii_lowercase)

print(alphabet_lowercase)

That Outputs:

['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:

import string

alphabet_uppercase = list(string.ascii_uppercase)

print(alphabet_uppercase)

Which outputs:

['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. 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 it the locale does).

There are a few other String Constants for digits and punctuation that you can check out in the docs.