pythonic way to count total number of letters in string in python

Question

I just started learning python, and I can think of two ways to count letters in a string (ignoring numbers, punctuation, and white spaces)

Using for loop:

for c in s:
    if c.isalpha():
        counter += 1
print(counter)

Create a list of alphabets and count the length of the list: (It will create an unwanted list)

import re
s = "Nice. To. Meet. You."
letters = re.findall("([a-z]|[A-Z])", s)
counter = len(letters)
print(counter)

Can anyone tell me is there a "pythonic" way to achieve the same result? like single line code or a function called that will return an int which is the answer? Thank you very much.

yatu · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-18 09:35:19Z

2

Your first approach is perfectly pythonic, and probably the way to go. You could slightly simplify, using filter or a list comprehension as:

s = "Nice. To. Meet. You."
len(list(filter(str.isalpha, s)))
# 13

Or:

len([i for i in s if i.isalpha()])
# 13

Your second approach isn't really advisable, since you don't really need to use a regex for this. Note that you could simplify that pattern to ([a-zA-Z]), by the way.

answered Sep 18, 2020 at 9:35

yatu

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3 Comments

heihei Over a year ago

So as far as i understand, there are no method or function that we could call? like: xxxx(s) which return an int?

yatu Over a year ago

What do you mean? There is i.isalpha() but you have to apply it on every character @heihei

heihei Over a year ago

Sorry, I miss that line, i think len([i for i in s if i.isalpha()]) is already the best way. Thanks so much.

Swetank Poddar · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-18 18:36:11Z

2

You can use regex to remove anything that is not a letter and then count the length of the string:

import re
s = "Nice. To. Meet. You."
counter = len(re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z]','',s))

edited Sep 18, 2020 at 18:36

answered Sep 18, 2020 at 9:43

Swetank Poddar

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2 Comments

Swetank Poddar Over a year ago

@JvdV, thanks for that! I updated my answer to only use alphabets

heihei Over a year ago

Thank you, another neat way!!

George Ogden · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-02 14:27:41Z

0

Using regex (re), you can find all letters and count their occurrence:

len(re.findall(r"[a-zA-Z]", string))

answered Aug 2, 2022 at 14:27

George Ogden

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