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How can I reference a string (e.g. 'A') to the index of a larger list (e.g. ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', ...])?

I have been racking my brain and scouring the internet for some hours now, please help.
Effectively I am trying to create a self-contained function (in python) for producing a caesar cipher. I have a list - 'cache' - of all letters A-Z.
def caesarcipher(text, s):
global rawmessage #imports a string input - the 'raw message' which is to be encrypted.
result = ''
cache = ['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']
Is it possible to analyze the string input (the 'rawmessage') and attribute each letter to its subsequent index position in the list 'cache'? e.g. if the input was 'AAA' then the console would recognise it as [0,0,0] in the list 'cache'. Or if the input was 'ABC' then the console would recognise it as [0,1,2] in the list 'cache'.
Thank you to anyone who makes the effort to help me out here.

Use a list comprehension:
positions = [cache.index(letter) for letter in rawmessage if letter in cache]

You can with a list comprehension. Also you can get the letter from string.
import string
print([string.ascii_uppercase.index(c) for c in "AAA"])
# [0, 0, 0]
print([string.ascii_uppercase.index(c) for c in "ABC"])
# [0, 1, 2]

result = []
for i in list(rawmessage):
result.append(cache.index(i))

How to make dictionary of alphabet and scrambled alphabet?

I need to create multiple dictionaries for another program using the alphabet as the key and a scrambled alphabet (the first one I have to do is BDFHJLCPRTXVZNYEIWGAKMUSQO) as the value. This is what I have so far but it says "unhashable type: 'list'"
_list = input("Enter list: ")
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']
dict1 = {}
for i in range(0,len(_list)):
dict1[alpha][i] == _list[i]
print(dict1)

There are two errors in your code.
dict1[alpha][i] should be dict1[alpha[i]]
As pointed out by Paul Rooney, you cannot use a list as a dictionary key, but I don't think that is what you are trying to do. Instead, you just want the ith element of the list alpha.
the == should be =.
== is used to compare, = is used to assign a value.
Also, the pythonic way to do your iteration is as follows:
dict1 = {alpha[idx]: character for idx, character in enumerate(_list)}
which is the equivalent of
dict1 = {}
for idx, character in enumerate(_list):
dict1[alpha[idx]] = character

Remove words from list containing certain characters

I have a long list of words that I'm trying to go through and if the word contains a specific character remove it. However, the solution I thought would work doesn't and doesn't remove any words
l3 = ['b', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y']
firstcheck = ['poach', 'omnificent', 'aminoxylol', 'teetotaller', 'kyathos', 'toxaemic', 'herohead', 'desole', 'nincompoophood', 'dinamode']
validwords = []
for i in l3:
for x in firstchect:
if i not in x:
validwords.append(x)
continue
else:
break
If a word from firstcheck has a character from l3 I want it removed or not added to this other list. I tried it both ways. Can anyone offer insight on what could be going wrong? I'm pretty sure I could use some list comprehension but I'm not very good at that.

The accepted answer makes use of np.sum which means importing a huge numerical library to perform a simple task that the Python kernel can easily do by itself:
validwords = [w for w in firstcheck if all(c not in w for c in l3)]

you can use a list comprehension:
import numpy as np
[w for w in firstcheck if np.sum([c in w for c in l3])==0]
It seems all the words contain at least 1 char from l3 and the output of above is an empty list.
If firstcheck is defined as below:
firstcheck = ['a', 'z', 'poach', 'omnificent']
The code should output:
['a', 'z']

If you want to avoid all loops etc, you can use re directly.
import re
l3 = ['b', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y']
firstcheck = ['azz', 'poach', 'omnificent', 'aminoxylol', 'teetotaller', 'kyathos', 'toxaemic', 'herohead', 'desole', 'nincompoophood', 'dinamode']
# Create a regex string to remove.
strings_to_remove = "[{}]".format("".join(l3))
validwords = [x for x in firstcheck if re.sub(strings_to_remove, '', x) == x]
print(validwords)
Output:
['azz']

Ah, there was some mistake in code, rest was fine:
l3 = ['b', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y']
firstcheck = ['aza', 'ca', 'poach', 'omnificent', 'aminoxylol', 'teetotaller', 'kyathos', 'toxaemic', 'herohead', 'desole', 'nincompoophood', 'dinamode']
validwords = []
flag=1
for x in firstcheck:
for i in l3:
if i not in x:
flag=1
else:
flag=0
break
if(flag==1):
validwords.append(x)
print(validwords)
So, here the first mistake was, the for loops, we need to iterate through words first then, through l3, to avoid the readdition of elements.
Next, firstcheck spelling was wrong in 'for x in firstcheck` due to which error was there.
Also, I added a flag, such that if flag value is 1 it will add the element in validwords.
To, check I added new elements as 'aza' and 'ca', due to which, now it shows correct o/p as 'aza' and 'ca'.
Hope this helps you.

Take every nth block from list

Given a list:
import string
a = list(string.ascii_lowercase)
What is the Pythonic way to return every nth block of m elements? Note that this is different from just returning every nth element.
Desired result of taking every 1st of 3 blocks of 3 elements (take 3, skip 6, take 3, skip 6...):
['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']
I can get to this as:
import itertools
s1 = a[::9]
s2 = a[1::9]
s3 = a[2::9]
res = list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(zip(s1,s2, s3)))
Is there a cleaner way?

For a fixed order of select and skip, you can wrap indices taking the modulo on the total length of the window (9 here) and select only those beneath the given threshold, 3:
lst = [x for i, x in enumerate(a) if i % 9 < 3]
print(lst)
# ['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']
You can make this into a function that makes it more intuitive to use:
def select_skip(iterable, select, skip):
return [x for i, x in enumerate(iterable) if i % (select+skip) < select]
print(select_skip(a, select=3, skip=6))
# ['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']

Perhaps just writing a simple generator is the most readable
def thinger(iterable, take=3, skip=6):
it = iter(iterable)
try:
while True:
for i in range(take):
yield next(it)
for i in range(skip):
next(it)
except StopIteration:
return
This has the advantage of working even if the input is infinite, or not slicable (e.g. data coming in from a socket).

more_itertools is a third-party library that implements itertools recipes and other helpful tools such as more_itertools.windowed.
> pip install more_itertools
Code
import string
from more_itertools import windowed, flatten
m, n = 3, 6
list(flatten(windowed(string.ascii_lowercase, m, step=m+n)))
# ['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']
windowed naturally steps one position per iteration. Given a new step by advancing beyond the overlaps (m), the windows are appropriately determined.

You can do it using some generic "chunks" recipe:
windows = chunks(original_iter, n=3)
Now that you've windowed you're data as you think of it, use islice's second variant for its' 'step' capabilities:
# flattens the list as well using chain
result = chain.from_iterable(islice(windows, 0, None, 2))

You can use a list comprehension and create a function that does this for any skip, take and list values:
import string
import itertools
a = list(string.ascii_lowercase)
def everyNthBlock(a, take, skip):
res = [a[i:i + take] for i in range(0, len(a) ,skip + take)]
return list(itertools.chain(*res))
print(everyNthBlock(a, 3, 6))
#^^^^ => ['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']
print(everyNthBlock(a, 4, 7))
#^^^^ => ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']

Using incomprehensible list comprehension :D
m, n = 3, 3
[elem for blockstart in range(0, len(a), m*n) for elem in a[blockstart:blockstart+n]]
#> ['a', 'b', 'c', 'j', 'k', 'l', 's', 't', 'u']

Is that a tag list or something else?

I am new to NLP and NLTK, and I want to find ambiguous words, meaning words with at least n different tags. I have this method, but the output is more than confusing.
Code:
def MostAmbiguousWords(words, n):
# wordsUniqeTags holds a list of uniqe tags that have been observed for a given word
wordsUniqeTags = {}
for (w,t) in words:
if wordsUniqeTags.has_key(w):
wordsUniqeTags[w] = wordsUniqeTags[w] | set(t)
else:
wordsUniqeTags[w] = set([t])
# Starting to count
res = []
for w in wordsUniqeTags:
if len(wordsUniqeTags[w]) >= n:
res.append((w, wordsUniqeTags[w]))
return res
MostAmbiguousWords(brown.tagged_words(), 13)
Output:
[("what's", set(['C', 'B', 'E', 'D', 'H', 'WDT+BEZ', '-', 'N', 'T', 'W', 'V', 'Z', '+'])),
("who's", set(['C', 'B', 'E', 'WPS+BEZ', 'H', '+', '-', 'N', 'P', 'S', 'W', 'V', 'Z'])),
("that's", set(['C', 'B', 'E', 'D', 'H', '+', '-', 'N', 'DT+BEZ', 'P', 'S', 'T', 'W', 'V', 'Z'])),
('that', set(['C', 'D', 'I', 'H', '-', 'L', 'O', 'N', 'Q', 'P', 'S', 'T', 'W', 'CS']))]
Now I have no idea what B,C,Q, ect. could represent. So, my questions:
What are these?
What do they mean? (In case they are tags)
I think they are not tags, because who and whats don't have the WH tag indicating "wh question words".
I'll be happy if someone could post a link that includes a mapping of all possible tags and their meaning.

It looks like you have a typo. In this line:
wordsUniqeTags[w] = wordsUniqeTags[w] | set(t)
you should have set([t]) (not set(t)), like you do in the else case.
This explains the behavior you're seeing because t is a string and set(t) is making a set out of each character in the string. What you want is set([t]) which makes a set that has t as its element.
>>> t = 'WHQ'
>>> set(t)
set(['Q', 'H', 'W']) # bad
>>> set([t])
set(['WHQ']) # good
By the way, you can correct the problem and simplify things by just changing that line to:
wordsUniqeTags[w].add(t)
But, really, you should make use of the setdefault method on dict and list comprehension syntax to improve the method overall. So try this instead:
def most_ambiguous_words(words, n):
# wordsUniqeTags holds a list of uniqe tags that have been observed for a given word
wordsUniqeTags = {}
for (w,t) in words:
wordsUniqeTags.setdefault(w, set()).add(t)
# Starting to count
return [(word,tags) for word,tags in wordsUniqeTags.iteritems() if len(tags) >= n]

You are splitting your POS tags into single characters in this line:
wordsUniqeTags[w] = wordsUniqeTags[w] | set(t)
set('AT') results in set(['A', 'T']).

How about making use of the Counter and defaultdict functionality in the collections module?
from collection import defaultdict, Counter
def most_ambiguous_words(words, n):
counts = defaultdict(Counter)
for (word,tag) in words:
counts[word][tag] += 1
return [(w, counts[w].keys()) for w in counts if len(counts[word]) > n]