regex matching

[Patrick C]

if i have a string, let's say its

xx = 'abc123def456gh i"

i'm having problems figuring out a way to know if xx[0] is a letter or number, then check xx[1] for the same thing and so on and so forth.

what i thought would be easiest is doing somethign through regex
have
pattern1 = re.compile('[a-z]')
pattern2 = re.compile('[0-9]')

can i make a loop that check something like...

j = 0
while j < len(xx):
    if j == pattern1:
        print "its a letter"

[bvdet]

if i have a string, let's say its

xx = 'abc123def456gh i"

i'm having problems figuring out a way to know if xx[0] is a letter or number, then check xx[1] for the same thing and so on and so forth.

what i thought would be easiest is doing somethign through regex
have
pattern1 = re.compile('[a-z]')
pattern2 = re.compile('[0-9]')

can i make a loop that check something like...

j = 0
while j < len(xx):
    if j == pattern1:
        print "its a letter"

You can also do something like this:[code=Python]import string

xx = 'abc123def456gh i>'

for letter in xx:
if letter in string.ascii_le tters:
print '"%s" is a letter' % letter
elif letter in string.digits:
print '"%s" is a digit' % letter
else:
print '"%s" is neither a letter or a digit' % letter[/code]

[ghostdog74]

>>> map(str.isalpha,xx)
[True, True, True, False, False, False, True, True, True, False, False, False, True, True, True]
>>> zip(xx,map(str.isalpha,xx))
[('a', True), ('b', True), ('c', True), ('1', False), ('2', False), ('3', False), ('d', True), ('e', True), ('f', True), ('4', False), ('5', False), ('6', False), ('g', True), ('h', True), ('i', True)]
>>>