String manipulation¶

Text manipulation and working with strings is one of the most common things in programming. Let us start with some simple things.

Invert letter case of string¶

Swap case of each character in a given text.

"THE quick brown fox, JUMPS ovEr the lazy dog".swapcase()

To use it on terminal.

$ python -c \
    "import sys; print(sys.argv[1].swapcase())" \
    "THE quick brown fox, JUMPS ovEr the lazy dog"

the QUICK BROWN FOX, jumps OVeR THE LAZY DOG

Rot-13 a String¶

From wikipedia:

We will look at two ways of doing it.

from string import ascii_uppercase as upr, ascii_lowercase as lwr
def rot13(txt):
    map = dict(list(zip(upr, upr[13:]+upr[:13]))+list((zip(lwr, lwr[13:]+lwr[:13]))))
    return "".join([map[el] for el in txt])

There is a lot going on here, so let’s break it down.

from string import ascii_uppercase as upr, ascii_lowercase as lwr

Standard python imports, not much to see here.

list(zip(upr, upr[13:]+upr[:13]))

This gives a us a list of two-tuples

We do the same thing for lower case letters.

map = dict(list(zip(upr, upr[13:]+upr[:13]))+list((zip(lwr, lwr[13:]+lwr[:13]))))

Now we lookup the substitution letter from the map and switch join the together to get the Rot-13 word.

return "".join([map[el] for el in txt])

Alternatively, we can go full “Betteries Included”, and using the codecs module do codecs.encode(txt, 'rot_13')

import codecs
def rot13(txt):
    return codecs.encode(txt, 'rot_13')

left pad¶

Left pad allow you to specify minimum length to your string and a fill char to pad with to enforce that minimum limit. This is easy to do using the rjust (right justify) methods on all strings.

def left_pad(txt, count, fill=' '):
    return txt.rjust(count, fill)

$ python -c "import sys;print(sys.argv[1].rjust(int(sys.argv[2]), sys.argv[3]))" foobar 60 →
→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→foobar

Speaking in ubbi dubbi¶

Ubbi dubbi is a language game spoken with the English language, Ubbi dubbi works by adding -ub- before each vowel sound in a syllable.

You can read about ubbi dubbi at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubbi_dubbi

This was recnetly popularised in “the Big bang Theory” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfR03gibh6Ms. Let’s look at how we would do it with Python.

vowels = "aeiou"
vowels_dict = {i: f"ub{i}" for i in "aeiou"}
def ubbi_dubbi(txt):
    return txt.lower().translate(str.maketrans(vowels_dict))

How are we doing it? We first generate a mapping of vowels to their ubbu-dubbi form.

vowels = "aeiou"
vowels_dict = {i: f"ub{i}" for i in "aeiou"}

We then use str.maketrans(vowels_dict) to generate the translation table, then use txt.lower().translate to generate the ubbu-dubbi. Let’s see the function in action.

In [4]: ubbi_dubbi("Subaru")
Out[4]: 'subububarubu'

In [5]: ubbi_dubbi("Speak")
Out[5]: 'spubeubak'

In [6]: ubbi_dubbi("Hubba Bubba bubblegum")
Out[6]: 'hububbuba bububbuba bububblubegubum'

Pig latin¶

Pig Latin is a language game in which words in English are altered, usually by adding a fabricated suffix. The reference to Latin is a deliberate misnomer.

The rules are simple

For words that begin with consonant sounds, all letters before the initial vowel are placed at the end of the word sequence. Then, “ay” is added,
When words begin with consonant clusters (multiple consonants that form one sound), the whole sound is added to the end.Then, “ay” is added,
For words that begin with vowel sounds, adds “way” to the end

vwls=set('aeiou')
def pig(wd):
  if len(wd)<2 or len(vwls&set(wd))==0:return f"{wd}way"
  elif wd[0] in vwls:return f"{wd}ay"
  else: x = min(wd.find(v) for v in vwls if v in wd);return f"{wd[x:]}{wd[:x]}way"
def pig_ltn(txt): return " ".join(pig(e) for e in txt.lower().split())

There is a lot going on here, and to fit the code in 280 chars the variable names are very short. Lets break it down:

vwls=set('aeiou')

We are creatiing a set of vowels. Then we use it to apply the 3 rules described above.

def pig(wd):
  if len(wd)<2 or len(vwls&set(wd))==0:return f"{wd}way"
  elif wd[0] in vwls:return f"{wd}ay"
  else: x = min(wd.find(v) for v in vwls if v in wd);return f"{wd[x:]}{wd[:x]}way"

There are few interesting things we are doing.

len(vwls&set(wd))==0 This finds if there are no vowels in the word.
len(vwls&set(wd))==0 This finds the first instance of a vowel, and f"{wd[x:]}{wd[:x]}way" splices the consonants from the beginning to the end, then adds way.

Convert to leetspeak¶

Leetspeak works by replacing certain letters. So we will use the same technique as rot13, and use .translate

leet_dict = dict(zip("aeilot", "431|07"))
def leet(txt):
    return txt.lower().translate(str.maketrans(leet_dict))

convert repeated spaces to one space¶

s = 'this    sentence          has              non-uniform      spaces'
print(' '.join(s.split()))

The above snippet clears out the repeated spaces in a text and replaces it with single space.

Check if a string is a valid IP v4 address¶

To find valid addresses, we can use ipaddress.IPv4Addres which fails, if the strings can’t be parsed ad an IP address.

def ipv4_check(ip):
    try:
        ipaddress.IPv4Address(ip)
        return True
    except ipaddress.AddressValueError:
        return False

Or if you want only traditionally formatted ip addresses.

def ipv4_check(ip):
    try:
        chunks = str(ip).split(".")
        return all(0<=int(chunk)<=255 for chunk in chunks) and len(chunks) == 4
    except ValueError:
        return False

In here, - we split the IP address on ., - then all(int(chunk)<255 for chunk in chunks) and len(chunks) == 4 checks if every chunk is an integer less than 255 and there are 4 chunks.

Check if a string is a valid IP v6 address¶

We use the same technique as above, but use ipaddress.IPv6Addres

def ipv6_check(ip):
    try:
        ipaddress.IPv6Address(ip)
        return True
    except ipaddress.AddressValueError:
        return False

In [32]: ipv6_check('2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334')
Out[32]: True

In [33]: ipv6_check('2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:733455')
Out[33]: False

Or if you want only traditionally formatted ip addresses.

def ipv6_check(ip):
    try:
        chunks = str(ip).split(":")
        return all(int(chunk, 16)<16**4 for chunk in chunks) and len(chunks) == 8
    except ValueError:
        return False

Again we use the same technique as IPv4, - splitting the address on : - Ensuring each chunk is parsable as a hexadecimal string, and less than 16**4.

Check if string is palindrome¶

A palindrome is a word, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward.

def is_palindrome(txt):
    return txt == txt[::-1]

Python’s extended slicing syntax [::-1] returns the reverse of a given string or an iterable. By comparing the two, we find out if a string is a palindrome.

Find all valid anagrams of a word¶

To generate all valid anagrams,

use itertools.permutations to genrate the permutations
Use words=set(open('/usr/share/dict/words').read().split()) to get a woldlist
Check if the existing permutation exists and then we will return a set.

import itertools
words=set(open('/usr/share/dict/words').read().split())
def anagrams(txt):
    return set(["".join(perm) for perm in itertools.permutations(txt.lower())
        if "".join(perm) in words])

In [5]: anagrams('hello')
Out[5]: {'hello'}

In [6]: anagrams('rat')
Out[6]: {'art', 'rat', 'tar'}

In [7]: anagrams('post')
Out[7]: {'opts', 'post', 'pots', 'spot', 'stop', 'tops'}