Decrypting Input? - python

This is my assignment:
Write a program which DECRYPTS secret messages.
It should first prompt the user for the scrambled alphabet. It then should ask for the secret message. Finally, it outputs the unscrambled version.
Note that there are exactly 26 characters input for the scrambled alphabet. All alphabetic characters are translated into their decoded equivalents (which will take a WHILE loop), and all other, non-alphabetic characters should be output exactly as they were without translation.
This is my code so far:
decrypt = ["*"] * 26
scram_alphabet = input("Please input the scrambled alphabet in order: ")
while len(scram_alphabet) != 26:
scram_alphabet = input("Please input the scrambled alphabet in order. The alphabet must have 26 characters: ")
num = 0
for each_letter in scram_alphabet:
decrypt[num] = ord(each_letter)
num = num + 1
print()
print("Your scrambled alphabet is: ", end = "")
for num in range (26):
print(chr(decrypt[num]), end = "")
print()
print()
msg = input("Now input your scrambled message: ")
print()
print()
alphabet = 65
for s in range (26):
decrypt[s] = (alphabet)
alphabet = alphabet + 1
print("The unscrambled alphabet is: ", end = "")
for num in range (26):
print(chr(decrypt[num]), end = "")
print()
print()
print("Your unscrambled message reads: ")
for alpha in msg.upper():
if alpha < "A" or alpha > "Z":
print(alpha, end="")
else:
ord_alpha = ord(alpha)
print (chr(decrypt[ord_alpha - 65]), end = "")
Ex: Scrambled Alphabet = XQHAJDENKLTCBZGUYFWVMIPSOR , Scrambled Message = VNKW KW BO 1WV WJHFJV BJWWXEJ!
Everything works fine until I get to the last print statement, where it says that the unscrambled message is the same as the scrambled message. I know that the instructions call for a while loop but I couldn't figure out how to use one to decode the alphabet.
Any helpers?

Well, as has already been noted, you are clobbering your decrypt variable.
However, you are also not building the mapping from the 'scrambled' alphabet to the regular one properly / at all.
Decrypting without using anything more than basic iteration over lists and simple list functions (index()) might look something like this:
cleartext = ""
for c in msg:
if c in alphabet:
pos = alphabet.index(c)
cleartext += string.ascii_uppercase[pos]
else:
cleartext += c
Rather than just patching your code, it could benefit from some improvement. I gather this is probably homework and you are probably not expected to go this far, but IMO there is nothing wrong with learning it anyway.
You are not checking that the input alphabet only contains whatever you consider to be legal values (e.g. probably A-Z in this case), nor are you checking for duplicates. The user could input any old rubbish and break your program otherwise.
Your printing and looping is not very idiomatic.
Functions are good for breaking up your code into more easily readable and maintainable pieces.
This may come across as old school or pedantic, but lines longer than 80 characters are not recommended style for Python. Adjacent string literals (e.g "one""two") will be joined (even across newlines).
If I had to do what you're doing without translate (see below), I might do something like this (just a quick example, could probably be improved with a bit of work):
import string
def validate(alpha):
# Is it exactly 26 characters long?
if len(alpha) != 26: return False
for c in alpha:
# Is every character in [A-Z]?
if c not in string.ascii_uppercase: return False
# Is this character duplicated?
if alpha.count(c) > 1: return False
return True
alphabet = ""
while not validate(alphabet):
alphabet = input("Please input the encryption alphabet in order (only A-Z"
" allowed, with no duplicates): ")
msg = input("Now input your encrypted message: ")
print("Your encrypted alphabet is:", alphabet)
print("Your encrypted message is:", msg)
# Create a mapping from one alphabet to the other using a dictionary
table = dict(zip(alphabet, string.ascii_uppercase))
cleartext = "".join([table[c] if c in table else c for c in msg])
print("Your decrypted message reads:", cleartext)
Lastly, you could also do this using Python's builtin string translation, like so:
import string
# read and validate alphabet
# read message
print(str.translate(message, str.maketrans(alphabet, string.ascii_uppercase)))

You are clobbering decrypt after you wrote all the scrambled letters into it:
crypt = ["*"] * 26
for s in range (26):
val = decrypt[s] - 65
crypt[val] = (s + 65)

Related

Issues iterating through strings and caesar shifting up and down at the same time

so I'm making a cipher and I want a program to easily encrypt and decrypt messages with this cipher, only issue is, I'm relatively new to Python and am not very good at this highly advanced stuff. I'm focusing on the encryption process right now. I've made a short guide on how to encrypt messages in this cipher in this document:
Cipher
I am having trouble finding a way to iterate through the individual characters in the string, shifting even characters down and odd ones up by the catalyst, and making the first character of each new word odd regardless of its placement in the string (and shifting numbers) all at the same time. I have the catalyst changing, reversing of the string, etc working just fine, it's just the actual encryption part that's giving me issues.
Here is my code so far:
# MTBE stands for Message To Be Encrypted
# Getting Catalyst
catalyst = int(input("Catalyst: "))
# The message to encrypt
mtbe = input("Message to encrypt: ")
# Reversing each word in the message
new_mtbe_one = reverseWordSentence(mtbe)
print(new_mtbe_one)
# Actual encrypting
catalyst_reset = 6
#
# Iteration/shifting stuff goes in here
#
# Code for updating catalyst (goes inside interation loop)
if catalyst < catalyst_reset:
catalyst += 1
elif catalyst >= catalyst_reset:
catalyst = 0
catalyst_reset += 1
(reverseWordSentence function you see in the code):
def reverseWordSentence(Sentence):
# Splitting the Sentence into list of words.
words = Sentence.split(" ")
# Reversing each word and creating
# a new list of words
# List Comprehension Technique
newWords = [word[::-1] for word in words]
# Joining the new list of words
# for a new Sentence
newSentence = " ".join(newWords)
return newSentence
I tried using and tinkering with code from websites like GeeksForGeeks and other websites but they ended up shifting the whole string by one amount, not shifting in two directions, doing some other weirdness, or a combination of those. I tried making my own system to no avail. I'm out of ideas. Maybe I'm missing something big but I am not sure.
Lets start with writing a function for encrypting a letter:
import string
letters = string.ascii_uppercase
def encrypt(letter, catalyst, is_odd):
letter_index = ord(letter) - ord("A")
new_letter_index = letter_index - catalyst if is_odd else letter_index + catalyst
return letters[new_letter_index]
Now it should be easy to use it correctly:
is_odd = True
encrypted = []
for character in new_mtbe_one:
# iterating over string iterates over every character
if character == " ":
is_odd = True
encrypted.append(" ")
continue
encrypted.append(encrypt(character, catalyst, is_odd))
is_odd = not is_odd
# catalyst stuff
In case to make it work with digits we need to improve slightly encrypt function:
digits = string.digits
def encrypt(letter, catalyst, is_odd):
value = ord("0") if letter.isdigit() else ord("A")
letter_index = ord(letter) - value
new_letter_index = letter_index - catalyst if is_odd else letter_index + catalyst
return digits[new_letter_index] if letter.isdigit() else letters[new_letter_index]
BONUS: Instead of getting day number from the input, you could get it from the current date:
def day_of_week():
return date.today().strftime("%w")

When writing the Caeser Cipher exercise, the input Secret Message should be outputted as Vhfuhw Phvvdjh but it is outputting as VhfuhwqPhvvdjh instead

My current code is looking like this:
message = input("Message to be encrypted: ")
shift = int(input("Number to shift by: "))
def encrypt(message,shift):
encryption = ""
for i in range(len(message)):
char = message[i]
if (char.isupper()):
encryption += chr((ord(char) + shift-65) % 26 + 65)
else:
encryption += chr((ord(char) + shift - 97) % 26 + 97)
return encryption
print("Encrypted Text:",encrypt(message,shift))
And I am not too sure on my whitespace character is coming out as q instead of a normal " " in a string. This is my first few weeks of coding so I apologize if I have overlooked a simple mistake.
To get the expected result, you should add this conditional before the others:
if char == " ":
encryption += " "
continue
You are not getting the desired output because when you got a space in the input string and passes to the char variable, the space is not a upper letter so your code goes right in the else statement. Although it works for letters it won't work for other special characters. So, as described in the title of your question, if you wish to maintain the space between the words, you simply add the space in your encrypted sentence.
However, my first suggestion will work only for the spaces. If you wish to mantain other special characters (i.e. %, $, #, *, etc) you should use:
if char.isalnum() == False:
encryption += char
continue

Checking "encryption" and "decryption" of Caesar Cipher using strings in python

I was supposed to create strings in my python function to show that the encryption and decryption of my code was working properly. Below is my code.
def encrypt1():
plain1 = input('Enter plain text message: ')
cipher = ''
for each in plain1:
c = (ord(each)+3) % 126
if c < 32:
c+=31
cipher += chr(c)
print ("Your encrypted message is:" + cipher)
encrypt1()
1.) I get the "Inconsistent use of tabs and spaces" error
2.) How should I input set, constant strings to get the wanted input check if my code works (for example, type in meet and get the correct input, etc)
Your code is mostly fine but there are a few issues that I've pointed out:
Your indenting is off. The line cipher += chr(c) should be indented to match the things in the for loop
The function encypt1() shouldn't take a parameter; you are setting plain1 in the method itself so you can declare it there
If you want to deal with just lowercase letters, you should be doing % 123 (value of 'z') and the if clause should check if c < 97. If you want to wrap around printable ascii what you're doing is fine.
This gives:
def encrypt1():
plain1 = input('Enter plain text message: ')
cipher = ''
for each in plain1:
c = (ord(each)+3) % 126
if c < 32:
c+=31
cipher += chr(c)
print ("Your encrypted message is:" + cipher)
Because you want to be able to test this on multiple strings, you would want to pass plain1 as a parameter to the function. But you also want the user to be able to input plain1 if a parameter isn't passed in to the function. For that I would suggest a default parameter. Look at the commented code below:
def encrypt1(plain1=""): # if no argument is passed in, plain1 will be ""
if not plain1: # check if plain1 == "" and if so, read input from user
plain1 = input('Enter plain text message: ')
cipher = ''
for each in plain1:
c = (ord(each)+3) % 126
if c < 32:
c+=31
cipher += chr(c)
return cipher # rather than printing the string, return it instead
So to test this you could do:
test_strings = ['hello world', 'harambe', 'Name', 'InputString']
for phrase in test_strings:
print ("Your encrypted message is:" + encrypt1(phrase))
Which gives the output:
Your encrypted message is:khoor#zruog
Your encrypted message is:kdudpeh
Your encrypted message is:Qdph
Your encrypted message is:LqsxwVwulqj

Python vigenere cipher going further than needed?

I am attempting to create the vigenere cipher in python and there seems to be a problem. Here is my encryption code:
def encryption():
plaintext=input("Please enter the message you wish to encode.")
#This allows the user to enter the message they wish to encrypt.
keyword=input("Please enter your keyword, preferably shorter than the plaintext.")
#This allows the user to enter a keyword.
encoded=""
#This creates a string for the user to input the encrypted message to.
while len(keyword)<len(plaintext):
#This begins a while loop based on the fact that the length of the keyword is shorter than the length of the plaintext.
keyword+=keyword
#This repeats the keyword.
if len(keyword)>len(plaintext):
#This sees if the string length of the keyword is now longer than the string length of the plaintext.
newkey=keyword[:len(plaintext)]
#This cuts the string length of the keyword
for c in range(len(plaintext)):
char=ord(plaintext[c])
temp=ord(keyword[c])
newchar=char+temp
if newchar>ord("Z"):
newchar-=26
newnewchar=chr(newchar)
encoded+=newnewchar
print(encoded)
I cannot seem to find the problem with it, however when I enter the plaintext "hello" and the keyword "hi" it come up with the following symbols: ¶´º»½. I think the addition in the for loop may be going too far.
You need to understand the ord() function, chr() is the inverse of ord()
for i in range(300):
print(str(i) + ' ' + chr(i))
If you don't use Unicode characters, you can use an alphabet string
alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
for p,k in zip(plaintext,keyword): # you can directly iterate strings
char = alphabet.index(p)
temp = alphabet.index(k)
newchar = char + temp
if newchar > 25:
newchar -= 25
newchar = alphabet[newchar]
I won't just solve the bug for you as there are many other things to improve here !
Put space around operators: a=b should be a = b, same with +, -, etc.
I find it better to use function params than input. You can always have a second function to get input and encrypt the input:
def encryption(plaintext, keyword):
pass # (do nothing)
I'll let you write the auxiliary function.
I, and most, usually put comments on the line above the corresponding code. Also, no need to write This every time, and imperative is generally preferred.
Now let's have a look at your while loop. The condition is len(keyword) < len(plaintext), inside you check len(keyword) > len(plaintext). When can that happen ? Only during the last iteration. So move the code out of the loop.
Also, what you do inside the if doesn't need an if:
any_string[:len(any_string) + n] == any_string (n being a positive int).
Plus you never use newkey!
So we can simplify the loop to:
# Begin a while loop based on the fact that the length of the keyword is
# shorter than the length of the plaintext.
while len(keyword) < len(plaintext):
# Repeat the keyword.
keyword += keyword
# Cut the string length of the keyword
keyword = keyword[:len(plaintext)]
Which is equivalent to:
# Do the operation once
txt_len = len(plaintext)
# Get a string just a bit longer than plaintext
# Otherwise we would have issues when plaintext is not a multiple
# of keyword
keyword *= txt_len // len(keyword) + 1
# Chop of the extra part
keyword = keyword[:txt_len]
Note that both will fail when len(keyword) == 0.
Now to the for loop:
You could use zip, as polku showed you, but I'll assume it's too complicated for now and keep the range.
You could also use the alphabet, but plain arithmetic can do the trick:
alphabet.index(x) == ord(x) - ord('a'), so in your code:
char = ord(plaintext[c]) - ord('a')
temp = ord(keyword[c]) - ord('a')
newchar = char + temp
# Or simply:
newchar = ord(plaintext[c]) + ord(keyword[c]) - 194 # 2 * ord('a')
If we ignore capital letters, we can safely substitute
if newchar > 25:
newchar -= 25
# With
newchar %= 25
Finally:
alphabet[i] == ord(i + ord('a')).
Here's all this put together:
def encryption(plaintext, keyword):
# Do the operation once
txt_len = len(plaintext)
# Get a string just a bit longer than plaintext
# Otherwise we would have issues when plaintext is not a multiple
# of keyword
keyword *= txt_len // len(keyword) + 1 # // is floor division
# Chop of the extra characters (if there are any)
keyword = keyword[:txt_len]
# Create a string to store the encrypted message
encoded = ""
# Now you should change this to work with capital letters
for c in range(txt_len):
# 194 = 2 * ord('a')
newchar = ord(plaintext[c]) + ord(keyword[c]) - 194
newchar %= 25
encoded += chr(newchar + 97) # 97 = ord('a')
return encoded
def encrypt_input():
# This function should use input to get plaintext and keyword
# Then use encryption with those strings and print the result
pass
Indeed the addition goes too far, because ord uses ASCII (where A is 65), while de Vigenère had A in the first position. You could subtract ord('A'). The code also assumes all characters are capital letters. Here's a variation that uses a few of Python's library functions to perform the task.
import string, itertools
def encrypt(text, key='N'): # default to rot13 (:
'''Performs a Vigenere cipher of given plaintext and key'''
result=[]
key=key.upper()
for plain,shift in itertools.izip(text,itertools.cycle(key)):
shiftindex=string.ascii_uppercase.index(shift)
shiftto=(string.ascii_uppercase[shiftindex:] +
string.ascii_uppercase[:shiftindex])
trans=string.maketrans(string.ascii_letters,
shiftto.lower()+shiftto)
result.append(plain.translate(trans))
return ''.join(result)
A more complete variant might only consume key for letters, but this will be fine if your strings only contain letters. The reason I stuck to the ASCII letters is because locale specific alphabets might not have the intended ordering nor a matching set of upper and lower case (for instance, german ß). It's also entirely possible to translate the key into a list of translation tables only once.

How to make Caesar decoder circular in Python (2.7)?

After much frustration, I have made my first Caesar Decoder :)
But the problem now is to make the program circular...
For example if we want to shift doge by 1, no problem, it's ephf...
But what about xyz, and the shift was 4???
So programming pros help a first time novice aka newb out :P
Thanks...
import string
def main():
inString = raw_input("Please enter the word to be "
"translated: ")
key = int(raw_input("What is the key value? "))
toConv = [ord(i) for i in inString] #now want to shift it by key
toConv = [x+key for x in toConv]
#^can use map(lambda x:x+key, toConv)
result = ''.join(chr(i) for i in toConv)
print "This is the final result due to the shift", result
Here is Python code that I wrote to be easy to understand. Also, I think the classic Caesar cipher didn't define what to do with punctuation; I think the classic secret messages were unpunctuated and only contained letters. I wrote this to only handle the classic Roman alphabet and pass any other characters unchanged.
As a bonus, you can use this code with a shift of 13 to decode ROT13-encoded jokes.
def caesar_ch(ch, shift):
"""
Caesar cipher for one character. Only shifts 'a' through 'z'
and 'A' through 'Z'; leaves other chars unchanged.
"""
n = ord(ch)
if ord('a') <= n <= ord('z'):
n = n - ord('a')
n = (n + shift) % 26
n = n + ord('a')
return chr(n)
elif ord('A') <= n <= ord('Z'):
n = n - ord('A')
n = (n + shift) % 26
n = n + ord('A')
return chr(n)
else:
return ch
def caesar(s, shift):
"""
Caesar cipher for a string. Only shifts 'a' through 'z'
and 'A' through 'Z'; leaves other chars unchanged.
"""
return ''.join(caesar_ch(ch, shift) for ch in s)
if __name__ == "__main__":
assert caesar("doge", 1) == "ephf"
assert caesar("xyz", 4) == "bcd"
assert caesar("Veni, vidi, vici.", 13) == "Irav, ivqv, ivpv."
The part at the end is a "self-test" for the code. If you run this as a stand-alone program, it will test itself, and "assert" if a test fails.
If you have any questions about this code, just ask and I'll explain.
Just add the key to all the actual character codes, then if the added value is greater than z, modulo with character code of z and add it with the character code of a.
inString, key = "xyz", 4
toConv = [(ord(i) + key) for i in inString] #now want to shift it by key
toConv = [(x % ord("z")) + ord("a") if x > ord("z") else x for x in toConv]
result = ''.join(chr(i) for i in toConv)
print result # cde
I'd recommend using string.translate().
So, we can do the following:
key = 1
table = string.maketrans(string.ascii_lowercase + string.ascii_uppercase, string.ascii_lowercase[key:] + string.ascii_lowercase[:key] + string.ascii_uppercase[key:] + string.ascii_uppercase[:key])
And then we can use it as follows:
'doge'.translate(table) # Outputs 'ephf'
'Doge'.translate(table) # Outputs 'Ephf'
'xyz'.translate(table) # Outputs 'yza'
In particular, this doesn't change characters that are not ascii lowercase or uppercase characters, like numbers or spaces.
'3 2 1 a'.translate(table) # Outputs '3 2 1 b'
in general, to make something "wrap" you use the modulo function (% in Python) with the number you want to wrap, and the range you want it to wrap in. For example, if I wanted to print the numbers 1 through 10 a bajillion times, I would do:
i = 0
while 1:
print(i%10+1)
# I want to see 1-10, and i=10 will give me 0 (10%10==0), so i%10+1!
i += 1
In this case it's a little more difficult because you're using ord, which doesn't have a nice happy "range" of values. If you had done something like string.ascii_lowercase you could do...
import string
codex = string.ascii_lowercase
inString = "abcdxyz"
key = 3
outString = [codex[(codex.index(char)+key)%len(codex)] for char in inString]
However since you're using ord, we're kind of going from ord('A') == 65 to ord('z')==122, so a range of 0 -> 57 (e.g. range(58), with a constant of 65. In other words:
codex = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
# every char for chr(65) -> chr(122)
codex = ''.join([chr(i+65) for i in range(58)]) # this is the same thing!
we can do this instead, but it WILL include the characters [\]^_`
inString, key = 'abcxyzABCXYZ', 4
toConv = [(ord(i)+key-65)%58 for i in inString]
result = ''.join(chr(i+65) for i in toConv)
print(result)
# "efgBCDEFG\\]^"
I know this is kind of an old topic, but I just happened to be working on it today. I found the answers in this thread useful, but they all seemed to use a decision to loop. I figured a way to accomplish the same goal just using the modulus(remainder) operator (%). This allows the number to stay within the range of a table and loop around. It also allows for easy decoding.
# advCeaser.py
# This program uses a ceaser cypher to encode and decode messages
import string
def main():
# Create a table to reference all upper, lower case, numbers and common punctuation.
table = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890,.!?-#'
print 'This program accepts a message and a key to encode the message.'
print 'If the encoded message is entered with the negative value of the key'
print 'The message will be decoded!'
# Create accumulator to collect coded message
code =''
# Get input from user: Message and encode key
message = raw_input('Enter the message you would like to have encoded:')
key = input('Enter the encode or decode key: ')
# Loop through each character in the message
for ch in message:
# Find the index of the char in the table add the key value
# Then use the remainder function to stay within range of the table.
index = ((table.find(ch)+key)%len(table))
# Add a new character to the code using the index
code = code + table[index]
# Print out the final code
print code
main()
The encode and decode output look like this.
encode:
This program accepts a message and a key to encode the message.
If the encoded message is entered with the negative value of the key
The message will be decoded!
Enter the message you would like to have encoded:The zephyr blows from the east to the west!
Enter the encode or decode key: 10
croj0ozr92jlvy73jp2ywj4rojok34j4yj4roj7o34G
decode:
This program accepts a message and a key to encode the message.
If the encoded message is entered with the negative value of the key
The message will be decoded!
Enter the message you would like to have encoded:croj0ozr92jlvy73jp2ywj4rojok34j4yj4roj7o34G
Enter the encode or decode key: -10
The zephyr blows from the east to the west!
Sorry if my formatting looks catywompus I literally found stackoverflow yesterday! Yes, I literally mean literally :)

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