16 The scrambler: Randomly reordering the middles of words

 

Yuor brian is an azinamg cmiobiaontn of hdarware and sftraowe. Yoru’e rdineag tihs rhgit now eevn thgouh the wrdos are a mses, but yuor biran can mkae snese of it bceause the frsit and lsat ltrtees of ecah wrod hvae saeytd the smae. Yuor biran de’onst atlaulcy raed ecah lteetr of ecah wrod but rades wlohe wdors. The scamrbeld wrdos difteienly solw you dwon, but y’roue not rlleay eevn tyinrg to ulsrmbance the lrttees, are you? It jsut hnaepps!

In this chapter, you will write a program called scrambler.py that will scramble each word of the text given as an argument. The scrambling should only work on words with four characters or more, and it should only scramble the letters in the middle of the word, leaving the first and last characters unchanged. The program should take an -s or --seed option (an int with default None) to pass to random.seed().

It should handle text on the command line:

$ ./scrambler.py --seed 1 "foobar bazquux"
faobor buuzaqx

Or text from a file:

$ cat ../inputs/spiders.txt
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
$ ./scrambler.py ../inputs/spiders.txt
D'not wrory, sdireps,
I keep hsuoe
csalluay.

Figure 16.1 shows a string diagram to help you think about it.

Figure 16.1 Our program will take input text from the command line or a file and will scramble the letters in words with four or more characters.

In this chapter you will

16.1 Writing scrambler.py

16.1.1 Breaking the text into lines and words

16.1.2 Capturing, non-capturing, and optional groups

16.1.3 Compiling a regex

16.1.4 Scrambling a word

16.1.5 Scrambling all the words

16.2 Solution

16.3 Discussion

16.3.1 Processing the text

16.4 Going further

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