In Python, how do I create a string of n characters in one line of code?

To simply repeat the same letter 10 times:

string_val = "x" * 10  # gives you "xxxxxxxxxx"

And if you want something more complex, like n random lowercase letters, it's still only one line of code (not counting the import statements and defining n):

from random import choice
from string import ascii_lowercase
n = 10

string_val = "".join(choice(ascii_lowercase) for i in range(n))

The first ten lowercase letters are string.lowercase[:10] (if you have imported the standard library module string previously, of course;-).

Other ways to "make a string of 10 characters": 'x'*10 (all the ten characters will be lowercase xs;-), ''.join(chr(ord('a')+i) for i in xrange(10)) (the first ten lowercase letters again), etc, etc;-).

if you just want any letters:

 'a'*10  # gives 'aaaaaaaaaa'

if you want consecutive letters (up to 26):

 ''.join(['%c' % x for x in range(97, 97+10)])  # gives 'abcdefghij'