I have been trying to figure this out for days. I just started learning how to code and I am not sure I understand instructions. Can someone please explain it to me and show how to solve it in Python? Thanks!
Coding Challenge
Decrypt string
Here’s a simple strategy to encode a message: before each character of the message, add a digit and series of other characters. The digit should correspond to the number of characters that will precede the message’s actual, meaningful character.
For example, the word “hey” could be coded with “0h2abe1zy”. To read the message, you would:
skip 0, find the ‘h’
skip 2 (‘a’ and ‘b’), find ‘e’
skip 1 (‘z’), find ‘y’
Other examples:
‘2xyz’ would be decoded as just ‘z’
‘0h2zyi2467’ would be decoded as ‘hi7’
Write a function named “plaintext”, which takes a single parameter of a string encoded in this format. It should return the decoded word in string form. Demonstrate good coding practices (clear variable names, comments, etc).You may assume that coded strings are always legally encoded with this system. You may also assume that the digit for the number of characters to skip will just be a single digit, not a multi-digit number (that is, you’ll never need to skip more than 9 characters)—but we welcome solutions that can handle multi-digit characters to skip.
This has us at a bit of a disadvantage since we don’t know what you know or are able to understand at this point. I could toss out a solution and you might not know all the finer details that surround what is essentially a very small piece of code with just three steps.
What do you know about strings and arrays, and the ways that we may manipulate them? That is what is central to this problem. As @rydan asked, what have you come up with so far? We can help you deconstruct the code and point you in the right dirrection if we see what you have done.
What I can show you is,
>>> s
'hey'
>>> en
[]
>>>
Consider, what is the setup for the problem? The return is expected to be a string. The count value will not exceed 9 (for now), the inputs are string of arbitrary length, and the encryption method is consistent. All this means we can develop an algorithm around it.
None of the criteria suggest any limits be placed on the imagination of a solution approach, which means, any means. Think this one through with a pencil and paper close at hand (or an interactive interpreter that let’s you manually write the lines of each step, to exhaustion of the input string). That’s how I did it.