Finding letters in a string

Question

I'm trying to write a code that finds the letters in a string containing special characters, numbers and letters. The following code returns nothing:

a ="&*&)*&GOKJHOHGOUIGougyY^&*^x".lower()
print(a)
final = a.split()
for y in final:
    if (y.isalpha == True):
        print(y)

Output: &&)&gokjhohgouigougyy^&*^x => None

Can someone tell me what is the issue and how can I do it without using the re.findall, e.g. using loops like:

for(y in final):
    if (ord(y) in range (97, 127)):
        print(y)

The above code works:

for y in a:
    if (ord(y) in range (97, 127)):
        print(y, end='')

Answer 1

You need to call y.isalpha as y.isalpha() this is because isalpha is a function or method.

>>> y='y'
>>> y.isalpha
<built-in method isalpha of str object at 0x00FA3A40>
>>> y.isalpha()
True

Note that your split will give you words not letters - which may not be what you are expecting:

>>> s = "Yes! These are words."
>>> for w in s.split(' '):
...    print(w, w.isalpha())
...
Yes! False
These True
are True
words. False
>>>

One of the things to get used to in python is the difference between a property and a method - a property is something that you can read a method performs some action - dir lists both so for a string s you have:

>>> dir(s)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__dir__',
 '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__',
 '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', 
 '__iter__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__',
 '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__',
 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__',
 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith', 
 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum',
 'isalpha', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit', 'isidentifier', 'islower', 
 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join',
 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'replace', 'rfind',
 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines',
 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill'
]

Where:

>>> s.__class__
<class 'str'>

is a property and:

>>> s.capitalize
<built-in method capitalize of str object at 0x03529F50>

is a method and needs to be called by the addition of parenthesis () to actually perform their function. It is worth also distinguishing between methods that return a value and those that operate in place.

>>> s.lower()
'yes! these are words.'

Returns a value as does s.split() but sort is an in-place operation, e.g.:

>>> words = s.lower().split()
>>> words
['yes!', 'these', 'are', 'words.']
>>> words.sort()
>>> words
['are', 'these', 'words.', 'yes!']
>>>