I'm looking for a simple and invertible way to represent a Julia string by an integer (e.g. for cryptography). To be clear, I'm not considering string representations of integers like "123", but arbitrary strings like "Hello". The representation doesn't need to be human-readable, but it needs to be easily invertible back to a unique string (so not a hash). It doesn't need to be efficient; I'm just looking for something as simple as possible. (Also, it's fine if it only works on a small character set, e.g. lowercase Roman letters.)
One naive way would be to collect the string into a vector of chars, parse(Int, _) each char to an integer, and concatenate the integers. But this seems cumbersome, and I suspect that there's in built-in Julia function (or small composition of functions) that will get the job done more easily.
If your strings only use the numbers 0-9 and letters a-z and A-Z, then you can parse the string directly as base 62 BigInteger:
julia> s = randstring(123)
"RFXkzD6VpWcwvbsxOtdTxS4DGcgciKgDXECa9fEK0Djcdkcj5N75vIHEMVyuH9mcYgvFbLhbPdrKyPIO4JsK1DKgZIacov6WKDZdIpGJ5iJ15dpjmcCBCybMmxB"
julia> i = parse(BigInt, s, base=62)
12798646956721889529517502411501433963894611324020956397632780092623456213685688389093681112679380669903728068303911743800989012987014660454736389459814982802097607808640628339365945710572579898457023165244164689548286133
julia> string(i, base=62)
"RFXkzD6VpWcwvbsxOtdTxS4DGcgciKgDXECa9fEK0Djcdkcj5N75vIHEMVyuH9mcYgvFbLhbPdrKyPIO4JsK1DKgZIacov6WKDZdIpGJ5iJ15dpjmcCBCybMmxB"
I created a (somewhat complicated) implementation that works for ASCII strings:
stringToInt(str::String) = sum(i -> Int(str[end-i]) * 128^i, 0:length(str)-1)
function intToString(m::Int)
chars = Char[]
for n in div(ceil(Int, log2(x)), 7)-1:-1:0
d, m = divrem(m, 128^n)
push!(chars, d)
end
String(chars)
end
Let me know if you can think of a better one.
Related
I want to check if string A is just a reordered version of string B. For example, "abc" = "bca" = "cab"...
There are other solutions here: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-if-two-strings-are-permutation-of-each-other/
However, I was thinking a hash function would be an easy way of doing this, but the typical hash function takes order into consideration. Are there any hash functions that do not care about character order?
Are there any hash functions that do not care about character order?
I don't know of real-world hash functions that have this property, no. Because this is not a problem they are designed to solve.
However, in this specific case, you can make your own "hash" function (a very very bad one) that will indeed ignore order: just sum ASCII codes of characters. This works due to the commutative property of addition (a + b == b + a)
def isAnagram(self,a,b):
sum_a = 0
sum_b = 0
for c in a:
sum_a += ord(c)
for c in b:
sum_b += ord(c)
return sum_a == sum_b
To reiterate, this is absolutely a hack, that only happens to work because input strings are limited in content in the judge system (only have lowercase ASCII characters and do not contain spaces). It will not work (reliably) on arbitrary strings.
For a fast check you could use a kind af hash-funkction
Candidates are:
xor all characters of a String
add all characters of a String
multiply all characters of a String (be careful might lead to overflow for large Strings)
If the hash-value is equal, it could still be a collision of two not 'equal' strings. So you still need to make a dedicated compare. (e.g. sort the characters of each string before comparing them).
I know the string methods str.isdigit, str.isdecimal and str.isnumeric.
I'm looking for a built-in method that checks if a character is algebraic, meaning that it can be found in a declaration of a decimal number.
The above mentioned methods return False for '-1' and '1.0'.
I can use isdigit to retrieve a positive integer from a string:
string = 'number=123'
number = ''.join([d for d in string if d.isdigit()]) # returns '123'
But that doesn't work for negative integers or floats.
Imagine a method called isnumber that works like this:
def isnumber(s):
for c in s:
if c not in list('.+-0123456789'):
return False
return True
string1 = 'number=-1'
string2 = 'number=0.1'
number1 = ''.join([d for d in string1 if d.isnumber()]) # returns '-1'
number2 = ''.join([d for d in string2 if d.isnumber()]) # returns '0.1'
The idea is to test against a set of "basic" algebraic characters. The string does not have to contain a valid Python number. It could also be an IP address like 255.255.0.1.
.
Does a handy built-in that works approximately like that exist?
If not, why not? It would be much more efficient than a python function and very useful. I've seen alot of examples on stackoverflow that use str.isdigit() to retrieve a positive integer from a string. Is there a reason why there isn't a built-in like that, although there are three different methods that do almost the same thing?
No such function exists. There are a bunch of odd characters that can be part of number literals in Python, such as o, x and b in the prefix of integers of non-decimal bases, and e to introduce the exponential part of a float. I think those plus the hex digits (0-9 and A-F) and sign characters and the decimal point are all you need.
You can put together a string with the right character yourself and test against it:
from string import hex_digits
num_literal_chars = hex_digits + "oxOX.+-"
That will get a bunch of garbage though if you use it to test against mixed text and numbers:
string1 = "foo. bar. 0xDEADBEEF 10.0.0.1"
print("".join(c for c in string1 if c in num_literal_chars))
# prints "foo.ba.0xDEADBEEF10.0.0.1"
The fact that it gives you a bunch of junk is probably why no builtin function exists to do this. If you want to match a certain kind of number out of a string, write an appropriate regular expression to match that specific kind of number. Don't try to do it character-by-character, or try to match all the different kinds of Python numbers.
I am trying to write a function that takes a string txt and returns an int of that string's character's ascii numbers. It also takes a second argument, n, that is an int that specified the number of digits that each character should translate to. The default value of n is 3. n is always > 3 and the string input is always non-empty.
Example outputs:
string_to_number('fff')
102102102
string_to_number('ABBA', n = 4)
65006600660065
My current strategy is to split txt into its characters by converting it into a list. Then, I convert the characters into their ord values and append this to a new list. I then try to combine the elements in this new list into a number (e.g. I would go from ['102', '102', '102'] to ['102102102']. Then I try to convert the first element of this list (aka the only element), into an integer. My current code looks like this:
def string_to_number(txt, n=3):
characters = list(txt)
ord_values = []
for character in characters:
ord_values.append(ord(character))
joined_ord_values = ''.join(ord_values)
final_number = int(joined_ord_values[0])
return final_number
The issue is that I get a Type Error. I can write code that successfully returns the integer of a single-character string, however when it comes to ones that contain more than one character, I can't because of this type error. Is there any way of fixing this. Thank you, and apologies if this is quite long.
Try this:
def string_to_number(text, n=3):
return int(''.join('{:0>{}}'.format(ord(c), n) for c in text))
print(string_to_number('fff'))
print(string_to_number('ABBA', n=4))
Output:
102102102
65006600660065
Edit: without list comprehension, as OP asked in the comment
def string_to_number(text, n=3):
l = []
for c in text:
l.append('{:0>{}}'.format(ord(c), n))
return int(''.join(l))
Useful link(s):
string formatting in python: contains pretty much everything you need to know about string formatting in python
The join method expects an array of strings, so you'll need to convert your ASCII codes into strings. This almost gets it done:
ord_values.append(str(ord(character)))
except that it doesn't respect your number-of-digits requirement.
Now I'm a programmer who's recently discovered how bad he is when it comes to mathematics and decided to focus a bit on it from that point forward, so I apologize if my question insults your intelligence.
In mathematics, is there the concept of strings that is used in programming? i.e. a permutation of characters.
As an example, say I wanted to translate the following into mathematical notation:
let s be a string of n number of characters.
Reason being I would want to use that representation in find other things about string s, such as its length: len(s).
How do you formally represent such a thing in mathematics?
Talking more practically, so to speak, let's say I wanted to mathematically explain such a function:
fitness(s,n) = 1 / |n - len(s)|
Or written in more "programming-friendly" sort of way:
fitness(s,n) = 1 / abs(n - len(s))
I used this function to explain how a fitness function for a given GA works; the question was about finding strings with 5 characters, and I needed the solutions to be sorted in ascending order according to their fitness score, given by the above function.
So my question is, how do you represent the above pseudo-code in mathematical notation?
You can use the notation of language theory, which is used to discuss things like regular languages, context free grammars, compiler theory, etc. A quick overview:
A set of characters is known as an alphabet. You could write: "Let A be the ASCII alphabet, a set containing the 128 ASCII characters."
A string is a sequence of characters. ε is the empty string.
A set of strings is formally known as a language. A common statement is, "Let s ∈ L be a string in language L."
Concatenating alphabets produces sets of strings (languages). A represents all 1-character strings, AA, also written A2, is the set of all two character strings. A0 is the set of all zero-length strings and is precisely A0 = {ε}. (It contains exactly one string, the empty string.)
A* is special notation and represents the set of all strings over the alphabet A, of any length. That is, A* = A0 ∪ A1 ∪ A2 ∪ A3 ... . You may recognize this notation from regular expressions.
For length use absolute value bars. The length of a string s is |s|.
So for your statement:
let s be a string of n number of characters.
You could write:
Let A be a set of characters and s ∈ An be a string of n characters. The length of s is |s| = n.
Mathematically, you have explained fitness(s, n) just fine as long as len(s) is well-defined.
In CS texts, a string s over a set S is defined as a finite ordered list of elements of S and its length is often written as |s| - but this is only notation, and doesn't change the (mathematical) meaning behind your definition of fitness, which is pretty clear just how you've written it.
Is there any way to replace a character at position N in a string in Lua.
This is what I've come up with so far:
function replace_char(pos, str, r)
return str:sub(pos, pos - 1) .. r .. str:sub(pos + 1, str:len())
end
str = replace_char(2, "aaaaaa", "X")
print(str)
I can't use gsub either as that would replace every capture, not just the capture at position N.
Strings in Lua are immutable. That means, that any solution that replaces text in a string must end up constructing a new string with the desired content. For the specific case of replacing a single character with some other content, you will need to split the original string into a prefix part and a postfix part, and concatenate them back together around the new content.
This variation on your code:
function replace_char(pos, str, r)
return str:sub(1, pos-1) .. r .. str:sub(pos+1)
end
is the most direct translation to straightforward Lua. It is probably fast enough for most purposes. I've fixed the bug that the prefix should be the first pos-1 chars, and taken advantage of the fact that if the last argument to string.sub is missing it is assumed to be -1 which is equivalent to the end of the string.
But do note that it creates a number of temporary strings that will hang around in the string store until garbage collection eats them. The temporaries for the prefix and postfix can't be avoided in any solution. But this also has to create a temporary for the first .. operator to be consumed by the second.
It is possible that one of two alternate approaches could be faster. The first is the solution offered by Paŭlo Ebermann, but with one small tweak:
function replace_char2(pos, str, r)
return ("%s%s%s"):format(str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1))
end
This uses string.format to do the assembly of the result in the hopes that it can guess the final buffer size without needing extra temporary objects.
But do beware that string.format is likely to have issues with any \0 characters in any string that it passes through its %s format. Specifically, since it is implemented in terms of standard C's sprintf() function, it would be reasonable to expect it to terminate the substituted string at the first occurrence of \0. (Noted by user Delusional Logic in a comment.)
A third alternative that comes to mind is this:
function replace_char3(pos, str, r)
return table.concat{str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1)}
end
table.concat efficiently concatenates a list of strings into a final result. It has an optional second argument which is text to insert between the strings, which defaults to "" which suits our purpose here.
My guess is that unless your strings are huge and you do this substitution frequently, you won't see any practical performance differences between these methods. However, I've been surprised before, so profile your application to verify there is a bottleneck, and benchmark potential solutions carefully.
You should use pos inside your function instead of literal 1 and 3, but apart from this it looks good. Since Lua strings are immutable you can't really do much better than this.
Maybe
"%s%s%s":format(str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1, str:len())
is more efficient than the .. operator, but I doubt it - if it turns out to be a bottleneck, measure it (and then decide to implement this replacement function in C).
With luajit, you can use the FFI library to cast the string to a list of unsigned charts:
local ffi = require 'ffi'
txt = 'test'
ptr = ffi.cast('uint8_t*', txt)
ptr[1] = string.byte('o')