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 letters and stuff”.

Using the string module, we now no longer need to type stuff like

• letters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
• letters = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
• punctuation = '!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~'

An example of my old code

We had to replace a with b, b with c, and so on.

letters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

d = {}
for i in range(len(letters)-1):
  key = letters[i]
  val = letters[i+1]
  d[key] = val
d['z'] = 'a'

print(d)

# {'a': 'b', 'b': 'c', 'c': 'd', 'd': 'e', 'e': 'f', 'f': 'g', 'g': 'h',
#  'h': 'i', 'i': 'j', 'j': 'k', 'k': 'l', 'l': 'm', 'm': 'n', 'n': 'o',
#  'o': 'p', 'p': 'q', 'q': 'r', 'r': 's', 's': 't', 't': 'u', 'u': 'v',
#  'v': 'w', 'w': 'x', 'x': 'y', 'y': 'z', 'z': 'a'}