Stop Typing “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” in full! (Python)

I’m sure you’ve done this at some point in your Python journey. Maybe you need to solve a question requiring you to map a letter to the next, or whatever.

I’m here to inform you that you don’t have to do this!

The built-in “string” module

Built-in means that we don’t need to install anything using pip — we simply need to import it using the import keyword

import string

This module contains a bunch of constants and functions relating to strings in Python eg. all english letters, punctuation etc

Using the “string” module

import string

print(string.ascii_lowercase)    # lowercase letters
# abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

print(string.ascii_uppercase)    # uppercase letters
# ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

print(string.ascii_letters)      # lowercase + uppercase letters
# abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

print(string.punctuation)        # english punctuation
# !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

print(list(string.whitespace))   # whitespace characters
# [' ', '\t', '\n', '\r', '\x0b', '\x0c']

Here, ascii stands for “American standard code for information interchange”. If you don’t care, it just means “standard english…