Checking if first letter of string is in uppercase

Question

I want to create a function that would check if first letter of string is in uppercase. This is what I’ve came up with so far:

def is_lowercase(word):
    if word[0] in range string.ascii_lowercase:
        return True
    else:
        return False

When I try to run it I get this error:

    if word[0] in range string.ascii_lowercase
                             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Can someone have a look and advise what I’m doing wrong?

Asked By: Blücher

||

Answer 1

This is built-in for strings:

word = "Hello"
word.istitle() # True

but note that str.istitle looks whether every word in the string is title-cased, so this might give you a surprise:

"Hello world".istitle() # returns False!

If you just want to check the very first character of a string use this:

word = "Hello world"
word[0].isupper() # True

Answered By: orlp

Answer 2

The syntax error stems from the fact that you need parentheses:

range(string.ascii_lowercase)

But in fact you shouldn’t use range. It’s as simple as:

if word[0] in string.ascii_lowercase

Answered By: Foo Bah

Answer 3

Why not use str.isupper();

In [2]: word = 'asdf'   
In [3]: word[0].isupper()
Out[3]: False

In [4]: word = 'Asdf'   
In [5]: word[0].isupper()
Out[5]: True

Answered By: AlG

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