In this tutorial, we will look at how to keep only letters (extract alphabets) from a string in Python with the help of examples.
How to extract only alphabets from a string in Python?

You can use a regular expression to extract only letters (alphabets) from a string in Python. You can also iterate over the characters in a string and using the string isalpha()
function to keep only letters in a string.
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Let’s look at both the methods with the help of examples –
Extract alphabets from a string using regex
You can use the regular expression 'r[^a-zA-Z]'
to match with non-alphabet characters in the string and replace them with an empty string using the re.sub()
function. The resulting string will contain only letters.
Let’s look at an example.
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import re # string with letters, numbers, and special characters s = "BuckyBarnes@123" # keep only letters res = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z]', '', s) print(res)
Output:
BuckyBarnes
You can see that the resulting string contains only letters.
Using string isalpha()
function
Alternatively, you can use the string isalpha()
function to remove non-alphabet characters from the string. Use the following steps –
- Create an empty string to store our result string with only letters.
- Iterate through each character in our given string.
- For each character, check if its an alphabet using the string
isalpha()
function. If it is, then add the character to our result string.
Let’s look at an example.
# string with letters, numbers, and special characters s = "BuckyBarnes@123" # keep only letters res = "" for ch in s: if ch.isalpha(): res += ch print(res)
Output:
BuckyBarnes
The result string contains only letters from the original string.
The above code can be reduced to fewer lines using list comprehension.
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# string with letters, numbers, and special characters s = "BuckyBarnes@123" # keep only letters res = "".join([ch for ch in s if ch.isalpha()]) print(res)
Output:
BuckyBarnes
We get the same result as above.
You might also be interested in –
- Python – Check If String Contains Only Letters
- Python – Remove Non Alphanumeric Characters from String
- Remove Substring From a String in Python
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