2011 February 10

Starting Python with Stephen Colbert

A Stephen Colbert Tweet prompts my first Python expedition !

"I'm off next week, so until I come back, please recombine the letters in this tweet into new ones for your enjoyment."

Using some online anagram generators, I came up with this: "Sweet nonentities wet poetless ,insociable muck; mix off to keen fury, monotony; win hot intemerate belcher jeer."

But I wanted to ensure that I have used exactly the same letters. This looked like a good time to try out Python. The broad algorithm I used is:

Given strings str1 and str2,

get a signature from each string by sorting all letters in each string (in lowercase letters, ignoring punctuation)
do a simple string compare

So, here is the simple program that resulted :

import sys
import string

def main():
    str1 = 'This. is a shell program'
    str2 = 'Shell? Is this a ...program !?'

    str1Sign = getSignature(str1)
    str2Sign = getSignature(str2)

    if(str1Sign == str2Sign):
        print("Woohoo!")
    else:
        print("Boo!")
        
    return 0

# the signature is decided to be a lowercased, sorted list of the characters in a string 
def getSignature(strg):
    # args for string.translate
    tbl = string.maketrans("","")
    delchars = string.punctuation + string.whitespace

    # cleanup the string
    strg = strg.lower()
    strg = strg.translate( tbl, delchars )

    # get the signature
    strChars = sorted(strg)
    return strChars


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Couple of observations about Python , IDLE :

History in IDLE is weird ... Alt+P , why not UP or some modifier + UP ?
the if __name__ .. section has to follow the declaration of main()

Starting Python with Stephen Colbert

References