2009/3/19 Alexander Daychilde (Gmail) <daychi...@gmail.com>: > That creates a list of numbers. I also need to do letters. That is, treat > a-z as base 26, and do the same thing. The three examples I gave from before > would be: > 1:9 --> a:z > 1:99 --> a:zz > 01:99 -- no "zero" in alpha to worry about, so no padding > necessary... > > So my first question is: Can I somehow treat letters like base 26? > > If I can, what about alphanumeric, i.e. 0-9+a-z would be like base 36...
The int() function takes a second parameter, which is the base. This is so that it can deal with hex strings -- for example, int('7a', 16) == 122. But the base can actually be anything up to 36. For converting a base n string to an integer, the digits are the first n elements of '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'. To go the other way, I had a quick poke around in the python cookbook and found this one-liner: def baseN(num,b,numerals="0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"): return ((num == 0) and "0" ) or ( baseN(num // b, b).lstrip("0") + numerals[num % b]) You may be able to find better ones. If you want to convert 'a'..'z' to integers by treating them as base-26 numbers.. it could be tricky because you (I think) have no 0. Multiplication without a 0 is really quite tricky :-) You might be better off writing a function to take one "integer" (e.g. 'ghzz') and produce the next one ('giaa'). Or you could cheat :-) >>> import string >>> letters = string.lowercase >>> pairs = [''.join([a,b]) for a in letters for b in letters] >>> threes = [''.join([a,b,c]) for a in letters for b in letters for c in >>> letters] >>> fours = [''.join([a,b,c,d]) for a in letters for b in letters for c in >>> letters for d in letters] >>> words = list(letters) + pairs + threes + fours >>> def wcmp(x,y): ... if len(x) < len(y): ... return -1 ... elif len(x) > len(y): ... return 1 ... else: ... return cmp(x,y) ... >>> words.sort(cmp=wcmp) >>> words[words.index('a'):words.index('bb')+1] ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z', 'aa', 'ab', 'ac', 'ad', 'ae', 'af', 'ag', 'ah', 'ai', 'aj', 'ak', 'al', 'am', 'an', 'ao', 'ap', 'aq', 'ar', 'as', 'at', 'au', 'av', 'aw', 'ax', 'ay', 'az', 'ba', 'bb'] Note that this is not very practical if your words can get out to five characters.. -- John. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor