Singlechar

Standard Single Character Variable Names

You should use descriptive names as a rule, but sometimes that is just too much for a temporary variable. Also, you may come across a bunch of single letter variables when looking at other code. Here are some of them.

• i,j: used as counters in for loops to represent the step

for i in range(10):
    print i

• c: used as a manually updated counter

c = 0
while c < 20:
    ...
    c += 1

• c: also used to represent a single character
• s: an arbitrary string
• n,x: arbitrary numbers
• t: generic temporary variable, usually when swapping values

t = a
a = b
b = t

• t: used for storing a total

t = 0
for n in values:
    t += n

• l, ll: an arbitrary list. l can also be an element of an arbitrary list

for l in ll:
    print l

• a,b: two similar values. Usually used when comparing two things

if a < b:
   print a, "is less"

• f: a generic file

f = open("info.txt")

• k, v: generic keys and values. Only used when it really doesn't matter what the key or value are

# dct is a given dictionary
new_dct = {}
for k,v in dct.items():
   new_dct[k] = v

# usually do this (generic people object...)
for id, info in people.items():
    print id, info.name, info.age

• m, n: when you need two generic numbers
• o: an object. Aslo abbreviated as obj
• a, kw: arguments and keyword arguments. Also abbreviated as args, kwargs
• r, c: row and column

Be sure to check out some of these other game programming and pygame variables