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pythonpandasdataframenumpyseries

pandas expand alphanumeric characters to iterate

I have a list with alphanumeric characters like as shown below

l1 = ['G1','L1']

I would like to know whether we have something like below

for i in range(l1):  #this doesn't work because range is only for numeric values
for i in range(G1:L1): #this also doesn't work

However, I want the i value at each run to change from G1to H1 to I1 to J1 to K1 to L1

Solution

  • Range always expects a number and cannot work with strings.
    However, you can use the built-in ord() function to convert letters to numbers and then use the chr() function to convert them back from numbers to ASCII characters.

    Code

    a = [chr(c)+'1' for c in range(ord('G'), ord('M'))]
print(a)

    Output

    ['G1', 'H1', 'I1', 'J1', 'K1', 'L1']

    Update: Solution for double characters.

    Doing it for double characters is a little more complicated, but this StackOverflow answer has a solution to that. You can simply use the from_excel() and to_excel() functions from that answer and replace them in my above code as follows.

    Code

    a = [to_excel(i) for i in range(from_excel('G'), from_excel('AG'))]
print(a)

    Output

    ['G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z', 'AA', 'AB', 'AC', 'AD', 'AE', 'AF']