How can I increment a char?

"bad enough not having a traditional for(;;) looper"?? What?

Are you trying to do

import string
for c in string.lowercase:
    ...do something with c...

Or perhaps you're using string.uppercase or string.letters?

Python doesn't have for(;;) because there are often better ways to do it. It also doesn't have character math because it's not necessary, either.

In Python 2.x, just use the ord and chr functions:

>>> ord('c')
99
>>> ord('c') + 1
100
>>> chr(ord('c') + 1)
'd'
>>> 

Python 3.x makes this more organized and interesting, due to its clear distinction between bytes and unicode. By default, a "string" is unicode, so the above works (ord receives Unicode chars and chr produces them).

But if you're interested in bytes (such as for processing some binary data stream), things are even simpler:

>>> bstr = bytes('abc', 'utf-8')
>>> bstr
b'abc'
>>> bstr[0]
97
>>> bytes([97, 98, 99])
b'abc'
>>> bytes([bstr[0] + 1, 98, 99])
b'bbc'