In this tutorial, we will learn how to increment characters in Python. Incrementing a character means to output the next character following the character in question.
For example, if the input is “a,” the incremented character output would be “b.” Incrementing characters can be useful in a variety of scenarios, such as generating ordered identifier codes or iterating through values in a loop. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Convert the character to its ASCII value
In Python, you can convert a character to its corresponding ASCII value by using the built-in ‘ord()’ function. The syntax for this function is as follows:
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<code>ord(character)</code> |
Here, the character is a string of length 1, i.e., the character for which you want to find the ASCII value.
Upon providing the required input, this function returns an integer representing the Unicode value (ASCII value for ASCII characters) of the given character. For example,
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ascii_value = ord('a') print(ascii_value) |
The output would be:
97
Step 2: Increment the ASCII value
Now that we have the character’s ASCII value, we need to increment it. To do this, add 1 to the ASCII value.
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incremented_ascii_value = ascii_value + 1 print(incremented_ascii_value) |
For the example input “a,” the output would be:
98
Step 3: Convert the incremented ASCII value back to a character
We need to convert the incremented ASCII value back to a character. Python provides the built-in ‘chr()’ function for this purpose. The syntax for this function is as follows:
chr(ascii_value)
This function takes an integer input, which is the Unicode value (ASCII value for ASCII characters), and returns the corresponding character as output. For example,
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incremented_char = chr(incremented_ascii_value) print(incremented_char) |
Given the input “a,” the output would be:
b
Full code
Combining all the steps, we get the following full code for incrementing a character in Python:
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def increment_character(char): ascii_value = ord(char) incremented_ascii_value = ascii_value + 1 incremented_char = chr(incremented_ascii_value) return incremented_char input_char = 'a' output_char = increment_character(input_char) print("Input character:", input_char) print("Incremented character:", output_char) |
Upon running this code, you will see the following output:
Input character: a Incremented character: b
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned how to increment characters in Python using the ‘ord()’ and ‘chr()’ built-in functions.
This process involves converting a character to its ASCII value, incrementing the ASCII value, and then converting the incremented value back to a character. Incrementing characters can be a useful technique in many programming scenarios.