How to generate a continuous string?

Question

I want to generate, in python (without a dictionary), a list of string from aaa-zzz and then output a txtfile such as this (note, the ... is short for the strings in between):

aaa
aab
aac
aad
...
aaz
aba
abb
abc
abd
...
aaz
...
zaa
...
zzy
zzz

The harder challenge is to genrate alternating (upper and lower) strings. How to generate these?

aaa
...
aaz
aaA
...
aaZ
aba
...
abz
...
abA
...
abZ
aBa
...
aBz
aBA
...
aBZ
...
zzz
zzA
...
...
zzZ
zAa
...
zAz
...
zZa
...
zZz
...
...
ZZZ

Just a bonus question, is there a way to not only include a-z, A-Z but also 0-9 in the generation??

order doesn't matter because i could sort it easily if necessary. ecatmur's solution was super elegant! — alvas, Aug 21 '12 at 15:46

score 27 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 21 '12 at 13:15

27

import itertools, string

map(''.join, itertools.product(string.ascii_lowercase, repeat=3))
map(''.join, itertools.product(string.ascii_letters, repeat=3))
map(''.join, itertools.product(string.ascii_letters + string.digits, repeat=3))

answered Aug 21 '12 at 13:15

ecatmur

152,476
27
293
366

I spent too long looking for `string.ascii_letters` :). Very nice indeed. – mgilson Aug 21 '12 at 13:17
Could combine the `join` with a write to file in the map function to meet the OP's requirements, but yes, nice. – Silas Ray Aug 21 '12 at 13:19
1

Just redirect the output. :-) – Moshe Aug 21 '12 at 13:25

How to generate a continuous string?

1 Answers1