How to make a continuous alphabetic list python (from a-z then from aa, ab, ac etc)
Use itertools.product
.
from string import ascii_lowercase
import itertools
def iter_all_strings():
for size in itertools.count(1):
for s in itertools.product(ascii_lowercase, repeat=size):
yield "".join(s)
for s in iter_all_strings():
print(s)
if s == 'bb':
break
Result:
a
b
c
d
e
...
y
z
aa
ab
ac
...
ay
az
ba
bb
This has the added benefit of going well beyond two-letter combinations. If you need a million strings, it will happily give you three and four and five letter strings.
Bonus style tip: if you don't like having an explicit break
inside the bottom loop, you can use islice
to make the loop terminate on its own:
for s in itertools.islice(iter_all_strings(), 54):
print s
You can use a list comprehension.
from string import ascii_lowercase
L = list(ascii_lowercase) + [letter1+letter2 for letter1 in ascii_lowercase for letter2 in ascii_lowercase]