Eakin, W said unto the world upon 27/12/05 09:59 AM:
> Hello,
> Although I've been coding in PHP and ASP and JavaScript for a couple of
> years now, I'm relatively new to Python. For learning exercises, I'm writing
> small Python programs that do limited things, but hopefully do them well.
>
> The following program takes a text file, reads through it, and any word
> longer than four characters will have the internal letters scrambled, but
> the first and last letters of the word will remain unchanged. Here's what
> happened when I ran the program on a file called example.txt.
>
> Before:
> This is a sample of text that has been scrambled, before and after.
>
> After:
> Tihs is a sapmle of txet taht has been sblrmcead, broefe and aetfr.
>
> The code follows, so any comments and/or suggestions as to what I did right
> or wrong, or what could be done better will be appreciated.
>
> thanks,
> William
Hi William,
I coded up an approach; no guarantees that it is anywhere near optimal :-)
I didn't bother with the file I/O portions. Also, it respects internal
punctuation in compound-words and the like. It does not respect extra
white-space in the sense that "A cat" and "A cat" produce identical
output.
Best,
Brian vdB
import random
from string import punctuation
tstring = '''
This is my test string for the scramble_words function. It contains lots
of punctuation marks like ')', and '?'--well, not lots: instead, enough!
Here's what happens when one occurs mid-word: punct#uation.'''
def scramble_words(a_string):
'''returns a_string with all internal substrings of words randomized
The scramble_words function respects punctuation in that a word is a
maximal string with neither whitespace nor characters from
punctuation.
Each word is scrambled in the sense that the characters excepting the
first and last character are randomized.
'''
output = []
for sequence in a_string.split():
chunks = punctuation_split(sequence)
# appending the joined chunks prevents spurious spaces
# around punctuation marks
output.append(''.join([_scramble_word(x) for x in chunks]))
output = ' '.join(output)
return output
def punctuation_split(sequence):
'''returns list of character sequences separating punctuation
characters'''
for mark in punctuation:
sequence = sequence.replace(mark, ' %s ' %mark)
return sequence.split(' ')
def _scramble_word(word):
'''returns word with its internal substring randomized'''
if len(word) < 4:
return word
middle = list(word[1:-1])
random.shuffle(middle)
return ''.join((word[0], ''.join(middle), word[-1]))
a = scramble_words(tstring)
print a
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