How can I check if character in a string is a letter? (Python)

Become part of the top 3% of the developers by applying to Toptal https://topt.al/25cXVn

--

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Forest of Spells Looping

--

Chapters
00:00 Question
00:37 Accepted answer (Score 308)
00:56 Answer 2 (Score 40)
02:18 Answer 3 (Score 3)
02:56 Answer 4 (Score 3)
03:48 Thank you

--

Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1555...

Accepted answer links:
[str.isalpha()]: https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/stdt...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#python #string #find

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 334

You can use str.isalpha().

For example:

s = 'a123b'

for char in s:
    print(char, char.isalpha())

Output:

a True
1 False
2 False
3 False
b True

ANSWER 2

Score 43

str.isalpha()

Return true if all characters in the string are alphabetic and there is at least one character, false otherwise. Alphabetic characters are those characters defined in the Unicode character database as “Letter”, i.e., those with general category property being one of “Lm”, “Lt”, “Lu”, “Ll”, or “Lo”. Note that this is different from the “Alphabetic” property defined in the Unicode Standard.

In python2.x:

>>> s = u'a1中文'
>>> for char in s: print char, char.isalpha()
...
a True
1 False
中 True
文 True
>>> s = 'a1中文'
>>> for char in s: print char, char.isalpha()
...
a True
1 False
� False
� False
� False
� False
� False
� False
>>>

In python3.x:

>>> s = 'a1中文'
>>> for char in s: print(char, char.isalpha())
...
a True
1 False
中 True
文 True
>>>

This code work:

>>> def is_alpha(word):
...     try:
...         return word.encode('ascii').isalpha()
...     except:
...         return False
...
>>> is_alpha('中国')
False
>>> is_alpha(u'中国')
False
>>>

>>> a = 'ａ'
>>> b = 'a'
>>> ord(a), ord(b)
(65345, 97)
>>> a.isalpha(), b.isalpha()
(True, True)
>>> is_alpha(a), is_alpha(b)
(False, True)
>>>

ANSWER 3

Score 4

I found a good way to do this with using a function and basic code. This is a code that accepts a string and counts the number of capital letters, lowercase letters and also 'other'. Other is classed as a space, punctuation mark or even Japanese and Chinese characters.

def check(count):

    lowercase = 0
    uppercase = 0
    other = 0

    low = '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'
    upper = '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'



    for n in count:
        if n in low:
            lowercase += 1
        elif n in upper:
            uppercase += 1
        else:
            other += 1

    print("There are " + str(lowercase) + " lowercase letters.")
    print("There are " + str(uppercase) + " uppercase letters.")
    print("There are " + str(other) + " other elements to this sentence.")

ANSWER 4

Score 3

data = "abcdefg hi j 12345"

digits_count = 0
letters_count = 0
others_count = 0

for i in userinput:

    if i.isdigit():
        digits_count += 1 
    elif i.isalpha():
        letters_count += 1
    else:
        others_count += 1

print("Result:")        
print("Letters=", letters_count)
print("Digits=", digits_count)

Output:

Please Enter Letters with Numbers:
abcdefg hi j 12345
Result:
Letters = 10
Digits = 5

By using str.isalpha() you can check if it is a letter.