Help! Creating Acronyms!

[c_shaft05]

Ok well I've hit a snag... i'm trying to write a program that makes Acronyms from user input... I can get all the letters capitalize, but the problem i am having is, well, taking the first letter from each and puting them together to make an acronym!!!!!

[shanenin]

you could use the split method

>>> "the dog is going home".split()
['the', 'dog', 'is', 'going', 'home']

I hope I did not ruin your fun , but here is the code I would use

userinput = raw_input('> ')
split_input = userinput.split()

x = ""
for i in split_input:
    x = x + i[0]  
    
print x

[shanenin]

this code is a little more polished

userinput = raw_input('> ')
split_input = userinput.split()

x = ""
for i in split_input:
    x = x + i[0] + "."
    
print x.upper()

[shanenin]

do acronyms even have periods in them?

[vegaseat]

do acronyms even have periods in them?

Most of the time they don't! Here is just one more way to do it ...

str1 = "senior health inFormation development"

# just in case it isn't all lower case
str2 = str1.lower()

# make a title-cased copy
str3 = str2.title()

# now build the acronym from the capitalized letters
str4 = ""
for char in str3:
    if char.isupper():
        str4 += char

print "Follow the inner workings:"
print "Original string:", str1
print "All lower case :", str2
print "Titelized      :", str3
print "Pick caps      :", str4

My problem is going the other way, like I can't remember what JPEG or JPG stands for! Hmm, maybe a Python dictionary would do that. Alright, ASCII stands for ...

[mawe]

Hi!

Here's a one-liner:

>>> str1 = "senior health inFormation development"
>>> '.'.join([word[0].upper() for word in str1.split()])
'S.H.I.D'

Regards, mawe

[vegaseat]

Great list comprehension example, mawe!
We just talked about list comprehension in a previous thread here, so I hope you don't mind, if I pick this apart for the beginning Pythonians amongst us.

# using list comprehension (mawe)
str1 = "senior health inFormation development"
acronym1 = '.'.join([word[0].upper() for word in str1.split()])
print acronym1  # S.H.I.D  note that join() does not add the final period

print

# let's pick this apart ...
# create a list of words from the original string
strList1 = str1.split()
print strList1
# this is the list comprehension part
# creates a list of upper case initial letters for each word
strList2 = [word[0].upper() for word in strList1]
print strList2
# create the acronym without periods this time, else use '.' in join()
acronym2 = ''.join(strList2)
print acronym2