Is there a fast way to generate a dict of the alphabet in Python?

python dictionary alphabet
Nope picture Nope · Jan 17, 2009 · Viewed 60.2k times · Source

I want to generate a dict with the letters of the alphabet as the keys, something like 

letter_count = {'a': 0, 'b': 0, 'c': 0}

what would be a fast way of generating that dict, rather than me having to type it in?

Thanks for your help.

EDIT
Thanks everyone for your solutions :)

nosklo's solution is probably the shortest

Also, thanks for reminding me about the Python string module.

Answer

nosklo picture nosklo · Jan 17, 2009

I find this solution more elegant:

import string
d = dict.fromkeys(string.ascii_lowercase, 0)

Related questions

Iterating over dictionaries using 'for' loops

I am a bit puzzled by the following code: d = {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3} for key in d: print key, 'corresponds to', d[key] What I don't understand is the key portion. How does Python recognize that it needs only to …

Read More
Check if a given key already exists in a dictionary

I wanted to test if a key exists in a dictionary before updating the value for the key. I wrote the following code: if 'key1' in dict.keys(): print "blah" else: print "boo" I think this is not the …

Read More
How can I add new keys to a dictionary?

Is it possible to add a key to a Python dictionary after it has been created? It doesn't seem to have an .add() method.

Read More