Просто из интереса сделал это:
# in ipython for the %timeit magick
nickname = 'abcdqajsdkfl83490'
alphanum = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"
%timeit nickname.isalnum()
324 ns ± 4.24 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
import re
%timeit re.fullmatch("[A-Za-z0-9]+", nickname)
1.77 µs ± 15.8 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
%timeit re.match("^[A-Za-z0-9]+$", nickname)
1.82 µs ± 3.27 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
%timeit re.match("^[A-Za-z0-9]+$", nickname).span()[1] == len(nickname)
2.42 µs ± 27.8 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
%timeit all([x in alphanum for x in nickname])
3.22 µs ± 46.2 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
%timeit sum([x in alphanum for x in nickname]) == len(nickname)
4.02 µs ± 66.8 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
alnum = set(alphanum)
%timeit alnum.union(set(nickname)) == alnum
## 4.19 µs ± 71.7 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
import re
%timeit all([re.match("[A-Za-z0-9]", x) for x in nickname])
29.4 µs ± 560 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
победитель: .isalnum()
как минимум на величину порядка!