This is a program that brute-force solves the ciphers in Chapter 7 of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. Pass it ciphertext as an argument, and it will print out 26 different "plaintext" sequences, one for each rotation on the cipher wheel.
Obviously, this program can spoil a lot of the fun, so be careful with it!
| import sys | |
| OUTER_WHEEL = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" | |
| INNER_WHEEL = "AOEPCTQIHJGFKBRYLVDZNXUWMS" | |
| PUNCTUATION = [' ', '.'] | |
| PUNCTUATION_DECODER = dict(zip(PUNCTUATION, PUNCTUATION)) | |
| def rotate_wheel(spaces): | |
| return INNER_WHEEL[-spaces:] + INNER_WHEEL[:-spaces] | |
| def build_map(inner_wheel, outer_wheel): | |
| decoder = dict(zip(inner_wheel, outer_wheel)) | |
| decoder.update(PUNCTUATION_DECODER) | |
| return decoder | |
| def decode_text(decoder, cipher): | |
| return "".join([decoder[char] for char in cipher]) | |
| def main(): | |
| for i in range(0, 25): | |
| decoder = build_map(rotate_wheel(i), OUTER_WHEEL) | |
| print(decode_text(decoder, sys.argv[1])) | |
| if __name__ == '__main__': | |
| main() |