string – Alphabet range in Python

Instead of making a list of alphabet characters 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)

>>> 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!"#$%&amp;\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'
    punctuation = '!"#$%&amp;\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'
    whitespace = ' \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'

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

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

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']

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

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

This is the easiest way I can figure out:

#!/usr/bin/python3
for i in range(97, 123):
    print("{:c}".format(i), end='')

So, 97 to 122 are the ASCII number equivalent to ‘a’ to and ‘z’. Notice the lowercase and the need to put 123, since it will not be included).

In print function make sure to set the {:c} (character) format, and, in this case, we want it to print it all together not even letting a new line at the end, so end=''would do the job.

The result is this: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Print the Upper and Lower case alphabets in python using a built-in range function

def upperCaseAlphabets():
    print("Upper Case Alphabets")
    for i in range(65, 91):
        print(chr(i), end=" ")
    print()

def lowerCaseAlphabets():
    print("Lower Case Alphabets")
    for i in range(97, 123):
        print(chr(i), end=" ")

upperCaseAlphabets();
lowerCaseAlphabets();