Is there a fast way to generate a dict of the alphabet in Python?
I find this solution more elegant:
import stringd = dict.fromkeys(string.ascii_lowercase, 0)
import stringletter_count = dict(zip(string.ascii_lowercase, [0]*26))or maybe:
import stringimport itertoolsletter_count = dict(zip(string.lowercase, itertools.repeat(0)))or even:
import stringletter_count = dict.fromkeys(string.ascii_lowercase, 0)The preferred solution might be a different one, depending on the actual values you want in the dict.
I'll take a guess here: do you want to count occurences of letters in a text (or something similar)? There is a better way to do this than starting with an initialized dictionary.
Use Counter from the collections module:
>>> import collections>>> the_text = 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'>>> letter_counts = collections.Counter(the_text)>>> letter_countsCounter({' ': 8, 'o': 4, 'e': 3, ... 'n': 1, 'x': 1, 'k': 1, 'b': 1})
If you plan to use it for counting, I suggest the following:
import collectionsd = collections.defaultdict(int)