Python – Check If String Contains Only Letters

In this tutorial, we will look at how to check whether a string contains only letters or not in Python with the help of examples.

How to check if a string contains only alphabets in Python?

You can use the string isalpha() function to check if a string contains only letters (that is, alphabets) in Python. The following is the syntax –

# check if string s contains only letters
s.isalpha()

It returns True if all the characters in the string are alphabets. If any of the characters is not an alphabet, it returns False.

Let’s look at an example.

# create a string
s = "Bucky"
# check if string contains only alphabets
print(s.isalpha())

Output:

True

We get True as the output. This is because all the characters in the string s above are alphabets.

Let’s look at another example.

# create a string
s = "Bucky7"
# check if string contains only alphabets
print(s.isalpha())

Output:

False

Here, we get False as the output. This is because not all characters in the string s above are alphabets. One of the characters in the string, “7” is a digit.

Also, be careful if you’re string contains any punctuations. For example, for the string “you’re” the isalpha() function returns False.

# string with punctuations
s = "you're"
# check if string contains only alphabets
print(s.isalpha())

Output:

False

This is because not all characters in the string are alphabets. The character ' is not an alphabet.

Again, this is expected because the objective of the isalpha() function is to check if all the characters are alphabets or not.

For more on the string isalpha() function, refer to its documentation.

You might also be interested in –

• Python – Check if String Contains Only Numbers
• Python – Remove Non Alphanumeric Characters from String