To get this new blog started I’m poaching an old post I made about scrambling words while retaining legibility. In the time since I originally posted this I found the source.
I was recently reading the Lucky Basartd page on the Stone Brewery website and I remembered an (unverified) study claiming “scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place.” For grins, I whipped up a Python script to scramble a word/sentence.
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| #!/usr/bin/python | |
| # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- | |
| def scramble(unscrambled): | |
| ''' | |
| Scrambles the word(s) in unscrambled such that the first and last letter remain the same, | |
| but the inner letters are scrambled. Preserves the punctuation. | |
| See also: http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/09/15/2227256/can-you-raed-tihs | |
| ''' | |
| import string, random, re | |
| splitter = re.compile(r'\s') | |
| words = splitter.split(u''.join(ch for ch in unscrambled if ch not in set(string.punctuation))) | |
| for word in words: | |
| len_ = len(word) | |
| if len_ < 4: continue | |
| if len_ == 4: | |
| scrambled = u'%c%c%c%c' % (word[0], word[2], word[1], word[3]) | |
| else: | |
| mid = list(word[1:-1]) | |
| random.shuffle(mid) | |
| scrambled = u'%c%s%c' % (word[0], ''.join(mid), word[-1]) | |
| unscrambled = unscrambled.replace(word, scrambled, 1) | |
| return unscrambled | |
| if __name__ == '__main__': | |
| print scramble(u'Indeed, here be some scrÖmbled words!') |
Featured image via mj ecker
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