A Caesar cipher is a simple substitution cipher based on the idea of shifting each letter
of the plaintext message a xed number (called the key) of positions in the alphabet. For
example, if the key value is 2, the word “sourpuss” would be encoded as “uqwtrwuu” The
original message can be recovered by ”reencoding” it using the negative of the key. Write a
program that can encode and decode Caesar ciphers. If encoding, the input to the program
will be a string of plaintext and the value of the key. If decoding, the input to the program
will be encoded text and the key value will be the negative of the original key.
Here are some sample runs of the program:
Please enter a string: sourpuss
Please enter a key: 2
The encrypted string is: uqwtrwuu
Please enter a string: uqwtrwuu
Please enter a key: -2
The decrypted string is: sourpuss
Please enter a string: zany
Please enter a number: 6
The encrypted string is: fgte
Here are some hints and notes:
You can assume that all the letters used are lower case.
if ch is a character in the string and key is the amount to shift, then the character
that replaces ch can be calculated as: chr (ord (ch) + key).
One additional case to worry about is when we ”drop o the end” of the alphabet.
A true Caesar cipher does the shifting in a circular fashion where the next character
after ”z” is ”a.” You can make your solution circular by doing some arithmetic and
using the modulus operator %.
For the output, you want your message to start with “The encrypted string is: ” if
the key is positive and with “The decrypted string is: ” if the key is negative. One
way to this is to use the following snippet:
s = “The encrypted string is:
” if key > 0 else “The
decrypted string is:
“