How To Check For [a-z] In String?

[Peter Otten]

Christopher Koppler wrote:

>>Also, how would I check if [a-z] is not in a string?
> 
> import string
> 
> sometext = "whatever"
> if not string.lowercase in sometext:
>   <do what you wanted to do>

Let's see:

>>> import string
>>> sometext = "whatever"
>>> if not string.lowercase in sometext:
...     print "do what you wanted to"
...
do what you wanted to

I doubt that this is what you expected. 

s1 in s2

tests if s1 is a substring of s2, but you want

def contains(s, chars):
    for c in s:
        if c in chars:
            return True
    return False
 
> expressions, but the string module is your friend in this case, and
> makes for very readable code, which is also unicode-ready, since
> string.(lower|upper)case also contain accented and other characters.
> Just do a dir(string) to see what other goodies there are...

Most of these are already available as methods of the str class and are
duplicated here only for backwards compatibility.

What's actually in string.lowercase/uppercase depends on the locale, you
should by no means take latin-1 for granted. 

You have already withdrawn the unicode-ready claim.

Nasty, nasty, nasty :-)

Peter