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()

Answer 1

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]

Answer 2

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.