Question

For my project I am required to go through a file and every car I find I have to name it using 3 letters and 2 numbers. Ex: ABC01. how would i program a function to automatically generate names like these, for example it starts with AAA01 and goes all the way to AAA99, then it goes to AAB01 and so on until I run out of cars to name. My question is simply how do i make a function produce these names, the if statement I can create to check if there are any cars left to name. Thanks a ton.

Answer 1

itertools.product() is good for this:

from itertools import product
import string

pools = [string.ascii_uppercase]*3 + [string.digits]*2
names = (''.join(c) for c in product(*pools) if c[-2:] != ('0', '0'))
# next(names) will give you the next unused name

For example:

>>> next(names)
'AAA01'
>>> next(names)
'AAA02'
>>> next(names)
'AAA03'