Pythonic String Testing
<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>
