I have a text I want to search for all it's upper case letters, then present these letters unique and sorted. I welcome any suggestions.

Here's an exampmle:

[php]
alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
text1 = "LQZYdMDHPEdWOAVUCBDdsfTEFgdfGIRKwerJMSONPX"
text2 = ""
upper_letters = []

#P
for letter in text1:
# Check to see if the letter is already in upper_letters
if upper_letters.count(letter) == 1:
continue
# If letter is uppercase, add it to upper_letters
if letter in alphabet.upper():
upper_letters.append(letter)
# Put list in alphabetical order
upper_letters.sort()
# Put list into string with nothing between the letters
text2 = "".join(upper_letters)
# Print the original string and the resulting string.
print "This is the text1 string: '%s'" % (text1)
print "This string contains only the uppercase letters in text1: '%s'" % (text2)
[/php]

This takes a string of random letters, puts each upper case in a list (unless it's already in there), sorts the list, puts it into a string, and then prints it out.

I hope that helped.

You can use Python's regular expression module re, very powerful for text processing, but there is a somewhat steep learning curve ahead!

Or if regular expressions are too painful, some kind of compromise:

[php]
def count_caps(s):
d = {}
caps = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
for i in caps:
d[i] = s.count(i)
return d

def print_caps(s):
d = count_caps(s)

# not 'for i in d' becuase dictionaries don't have guaranteed order
for i in "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ":
if d[i]:
print i + ":" + str(d[i]),

print_caps("ASDHbajksfhHHLASD")
A:2 D:2 H:3 L:1 S:2
[/php]

Jeff

Thanks Jeff, that is even fancier than I needed. Will come in handy though!

The re module seems to be nice, really don't have much trouble seeing the syntax, but I have a little problem understanding the one liner about making a list unique and sort.

My humble contribution using a list comprehension:
[php]# create a unique sorted list of all upper case letters in text
text = "This text has Upper and Lower Case Letters"
unique_list = []
[unique_list.append(c) for c in text if c.isupper() and c not in unique_list]
print sorted(unique_list) # ['C', 'L', 'T', 'U']
[/php]Here is the breakdown of vegaseat's one liner as I see it:
[php]text = "This text has Upper and Lower Case Letters"

uppers_raw = re.findall("[A-Z]", text) # ['T', 'U', 'L', 'C', 'L']
uppers_set = set(uppers_raw) # set(['C', 'U', 'T', 'L'])
uppers_list = list(uppers_set) # ['C', 'U', 'T', 'L']
uppers_sorted = sorted(uppers_list) # ['C', 'L', 'T', 'U']
[/php]

So set() removes duplicates?

Yes, going fom a list to a set then back to a list removes duplicates from the list, but it will change the order of the elements. So, only use this little trick when order does not matter.

Looks like this code comes in handy too:
Thanks to all who helped!