title: Pythonic String Testing
body: <p>For my Information Retrieval class I have to make an index of terms from a group of files. Valid terms contain an alphabetical character, so to test I just made a simple function and use an if/then control statement. Thus far I have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALPHA = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 
  'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']
  
  def content_test(term):
      for a in ALPHA:
          if a in term:
              return True
      return False
  
  class FileRead():
  
      def __init__(self, filename):
          f = open(filename, 'r')
          content = f.read()
          self.terms = content.split()
  
      def clean(self):
          for term in self.terms:
              if content_test(term) is False:
                  try:
                      terms.remove(term)
                  except:
                      pass
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now this all works fine (I think...) however I've been trying to learn more higher level python and I can't help but think that there is a more pythonic way of checking term validity (maybe using map(), or a lambda function?).</p>
  
  <p>Am I correct or am I just overthinking it?</p>