Weirdtext

WeirdText encoding and decoding

WeirdText is a text encoding.

It is not “encryption” because humans can usually read it quite easily. But machines may
find it difficult to read without the list of original words. Except of having fun, there are
real-world applications for this, e.g. if encryption is forbidden by law in your country, but
you still don’t want your email content to get automatically processed somehow.

Encoding

For each original word in the original text, leave the first and last character of it in that
position, but shuffle (permutate) all the characters in the middle of the word. If possible,
the resulting “encoded” word MUST NOT be the same as the original word. Keep
everything else (whitespace, punctuation, etc.) like in the original. To make decoding by a
machine possible, your encoder shall also output a sorted list of original words (only
include words that got shuffled, not text that did not).

The composite output of the encoder (see example below) contains encoded text
(WeirdText) and also the sorted list of original words.

Decoding
For decoding composite text, first do a simple check whether the text looks like composite
output of your encoder. If not, raise some reasonable exception.

Then, use the encoded text and the words list to decode the text.

Your decoded output should, as far as possible, be identical to the original text. In case of
ambiguities (some encoded word could have been multiple original words), decoding
errors are acceptable.

Example
Original Text (this is a single string formatted nicely for better viewing!)::
‘This is a long looong test sentence,\n’
‘with some big (biiiiig) words!’

Encoded Text (see comment above)::

‘\n—weird—\n’
‘Tihs is a lnog loonog tset sntceene,\n’
‘wtih smoe big (biiiiig) wdros!’
‘\n—weird—\n’
‘long looong sentence some test This with words’

Decoded Text::
‘This is a long looong test sentence,\n’
‘with some big (biiiiig) words!’

Task
implement encoder first, this is easy to medium difficulty
you don’t need to implement tests until after you have implemented (or tried to
implement) the decoder
decoder is medium to hard difficulty, implement that after encoder
if you have the decoder, implement a reasonable amount of tests
if you can’t create the decoder and you have time left, implement some simple tests for
the encoder (as far as possible).

Implementation hints
You may find these hints/code fragments useful:
separator at the start of encoded output shall be used as a “magic” value and checked by
decoder
separator is also used to separate the encoded text from the sorted original word list
separator = ‘\n—weird—\n’
tokenize_re = re.compile(r'(\w+)', re.U) find out for what exactly this is useful
import random find out for what exactly this is useful

Scoring
coding style
code docs/comments
quality of code
 knowledge of python/stdlib
working encoder
working decoder
working tests

Extra tasks
Level 1
2. Preparing WeirdText RESTful app and deploying it in the cloud (on Heroku, Google App
Engine, Elastic Beanstalk etc).
3. There should be just 2 endpoints /v1/encode and /v1/decode.
4. Provide the url to that service with brief API documentation (with examples of usage)
5. Use Github repo to store your code with README.md with info how to deploy the app
Level 2
1. Add CircleCI (or similar) integration that should
1. run lint/tests on each commit
2. when commit is pushed/merged to master repo, it should automatically deploy to the
cloud
Level 3
1. Using modern JS framework, create SPA that will allow to use above endpoints to
decode / encode given text.
2. It should live in separate GitHub repo
3. Should be hosted on Heroku/Netlify/S3 or similar
4. Automatically deployed when pushing/merging commit to master