Need to add to ord and convert to chr

[Stephen Kloder]

mchitti at my-deja.com wrote:

> Trying to teach myself python, would appreciate any help.
>
> I have a long string of letters (a caesar cipher) which I chop up,
> convert to ord values and stick into a list.  I need to be able to add
> an arbitrary interger to the ord values and then convert back to char.
> This should allow me to brute force the cipher if my logic is good.
>
> TIA
>

If your converting one character at a time, you might want to use
translation tables instead.  For example:
>>> from string import uppercase,lowercase,letters,maketrans,translate
>>>
t=maketrans(letters,lowercase[1:]+lowercase[:1]+uppercase[1:]+uppercase[:1])

will create a translation table which shifts every letter one character up
(and wraps around) but does not affect nonnonletters.  This can be
implemented by:
>>> translate('abcde',t)
'bcdef'

I'm sure you can see an easy way to generalize this.

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Stephen Kloder               |   "I say what it occurs to me to say.
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