I want to create a list of string that resemble the column letters in Microsoft Excel. For example, after 26 columns, the next columns become AA
, AB
, AC
, etc.
I have tried using the modulus operator, but I just end up with AA
, BB
, CC
, etc...
import string
passes_through_alphabet = 0
for num, col in enumerate([_ for _ in range(40)]):
if num % 26 == 0:
passes_through_alphabet += 1
excel_col = string.ascii_uppercase[num%26] * passes_through_alphabet
print(num, excel_col)
0 A
1 B
2 C
3 D
...
22 W
23 X
24 Y
25 Z
26 AA
27 BB
28 CC
...
You can use itertools.product for this:
import string
import itertools
list(itertools.product(string.ascii_uppercase, repeat=2))
Output:
[('A', 'A'), ('A', 'B'), ('A', 'C'), ('A', 'D'), ...
Combining this with the first set of letters, and joining the pairs results in:
list(
itertools.chain(
string.ascii_uppercase,
(''.join(pair) for pair in itertools.product(string.ascii_uppercase, repeat=2))
))
Output:
['A', 'B', 'C', .. 'AA', 'AB', 'AC' .. 'ZZ']
To generalize, we define a generator that builds up bigger and bigger products. Note that the yield is only available in python 3.3+, but you can just use a for loop to yield each item if you're on python 2.
def excel_cols():
n = 1
while True:
yield from (''.join(group) for group in itertools.product(string.ascii_uppercase, repeat=n))
n += 1
list(itertools.islice(excel_cols(), 28))
output
['A', 'B', 'C', ... 'X', 'Y', 'Z','AA', 'AB']