I created a function to split inputed string into list of words and then replace the letters in each word with its shifted counterpart but when I set the shift to over 30 it prints unchanged.
def ceaser_cipher_encoder(string , num):
alphabet = ["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"]
new_string = ""
string_list = string.split(" ")
new_list = []
for word in string_list:
word1 = ""
for charecter in word:
letter_position = alphabet.index(charecter)
letter_position_with_shift = letter_position + num
if letter_position_with_shift > 25:
letter_position_with_shift = 0 + ((letter_position - 25) - 1)
word1 += charecter.replace(charecter, alphabet[letter_position_with_shift])
new_list.append(word1)
end_string = " ".join(new_list)
return end_string
message = ceaser_cipher_encoder("hello dad", 35)
print(message)
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Answer
One useful trick here is to use the modulus operator (%). It will take care of the shift for you.
Here is how I would do :
def ceaser_cipher_encoder(string , num):
alphabet = ["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"]
new_string = ""
for c in string:
new_string += alphabet[(alphabet.index(c) + num) % len(alphabet)]
return new_string
Let’s say c is “y” and num is 10. You would then have alphabet.index(c) equal to 24, so the shift would return 34. Since 34 modulo 26 is 8, it would append alphabet[8] (“i”) to new_string.
I used len(alphabet) instead of hard-coding 26 so that you can change your alphabet and the code would still work.