How to check a string for multiple letters in python

Question

I am wondering how to check a string for certain letters to attach values to them so I can add them up, then return the total to the user.

How would I go with doing so?

Possible duplicate of [Does Python have a string contains substring method?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3437059/does-python-have-a-string-contains-substring-method) — AutomatedOrder, Oct 16 '15 at 16:03
Have a look at this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5188792/how-to-check-a-string-for-specific-characters This will help you. — Leon, Oct 16 '15 at 16:11

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 16 '15 at 16:12

2

a_string = "abcde"
letters = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u"]

for x in a_string:
    if(x in letters):
        print(x+" is in "+a_string)

From here you can use a dictionary to map "x" to a point value.

answered Oct 16 '15 at 16:12

New2Programming

81
6

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 16 '15 at 16:11

This can easily be done using a dictionary and for loop.

# Dictionary matching letters to values
letter_val = {'a': 1,
              'b': 2,
              'c': 3,
              'd': 4
              }

def myFunction(s):
    """Function takes a string and checks each character
    against the dictionary values. If letter is in then
    add value to result"""
    res = 0
    for char in s:
        if char in letter_val:
            res += letter_val[char]
    return res

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 16 '15 at 16:48

If you do not want to assign specific values to the letters, you can use the Unicode integers and deduct the Unicode start value to get 1 through 24 (a-z):

>>> a = 'aBcDefghijklmnopqrstuvwXyZ'
>>> tot=0
>>> for i in a:
...  tot+=int(ord(i.lower()))-96
... 
>>> tot
351

ord() returns the Unicode value of the character, where "a" = 97 and i.lower() converts all the letters to lower-case.
To run using upper-case letters use i.upper() instead and deduct 64, where Unicode value of "A" is 65

How to check a string for multiple letters in python

3 Answers3