How to scramble the words in a sentence - Python

Question

I have created the following code to scramble the letters in a word (except for the first and last letters), but how would one scramble the letters of the words in a sentence; given the input asks for a sentence instead of a word. Thank you for your time!

import random

def main():
    word = input("Please enter a word: ")
        print(scramble(word)) 

def scramble(word):
    char1 = random.randint(1, len(word)-2)
    char2 = random.randint(1, len(word)-2)
    while char1 == char2:
        char2 = random.randint(1, len(word)-2)
    newWord = ""

    for i in range(len(word)):
        if i == char1:
            newWord = newWord + word[char2]
        elif i == char2:
        newWord = newWord + word[char1]

        else:

            newWord = newWord + word[i]

    return newWord

main()

Suspected copy of [Are there any way to scramble strings in Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6181304/are-there-any-way-to-scramble-strings-in-python). — CyanCoding, Sep 14 '17 at 16:14

William McBrine · Answer 1 · 2014-03-04T02:04:30.623

4

May I suggest random.shuffle()?

def scramble(word):
    foo = list(word)
    random.shuffle(foo)
    return ''.join(foo)

To scramble the order of words:

words = input.split()
random.shuffle(words)
new_sentence = ' '.join(words)

To scramble each word in a sentence, preserving the order:

new_sentence = ' '.join(scramble(word) for word in input.split())

If it's important to preserve the first and last letters as-is:

def scramble(word):
    foo = list(word[1:-1])
    random.shuffle(foo)
    return word[0] + ''.join(foo) + word[-1]

edited Mar 04 '14 at 02:04

answered Mar 04 '14 at 01:36

William McBrine

2,166
11
7

First thing that came to mind for me too, but the OP's code only swaps two random letters in the word, restricted to not the first or last letters. Assuming this is the desired behavior, `shuffle` is unsuitable for the task. – user2357112 Mar 04 '14 at 01:47

user2357112 · Answer 2 · 2014-03-04T01:52:53.930

Split the sentence into a list of words (and some punctuation) with the split method:

words = input().split()

and then do pretty much the same thing you were doing before, except with a list instead of a string.

word1 = random.randint(1, len(words)-2)

...

newWords = []

...

newWords.append(whatever)

There are more efficient ways to do the swap than what you're doing, though:

def swap_random_middle_words(sentence):
    newsentence = list(sentence)

    i, j = random.sample(xrange(1, len(sentence) - 1), 2)

    newsentence[i], newsentence[j] = newsentence[j], newsentence[i]

    return newsentence

If what you actually want to do is apply your one-word scramble to each word of a sentence, you can do that with a loop or list comprehension:

sentence = input().split()
scrambled_sentence = [scramble(word) for word in sentence]

If you want to completely randomize the order of the middle letters (or words), rather than just swapping two random letters (or words), the random.shuffle function is likely to be useful.

How to scramble the words in a sentence - Python

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