> "Hello Tutors!" could be split into:
>
> "Hell" "o Tut" "ors!"
>
> and xor'd with "beer"
>
> I think I understand how xor works (thanks to an earlier post) but I'm
> not sure how to iterate over each letter in a string. What is the
> recommended way to do this?
The xor bitwise operator works with numbers --- not directly with strings
--- so one of your tasks will probably be to take a chunk like:
"beer"
and turn it into some numeric bit pattern.
It turns out that this isn't too bad if we abuse the 'struct' module:
http://www.python.org/doc/lib/module-struct.html
The idea is to unpack four single characters as a single 4-byte integer.
For example:
######
>>> struct.unpack('i', 'food')
(1685024614,)
######
This kind of transformation is reversable:
######
>>> struct.pack('i', 1685024614)
'food'
######
Does this make sense?
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