Scramble a string.

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I am trying to write a perl script that will take user input as a string and scramble the string and print the result.
Note: I cannot use shuffle function ....using for loop.

so here is example.
Enter a String: abcdef

Print the Result: debacf 

Enter a String: abcdef

print the Result: cdabef

Here is my perl code but it doesn't work exactly:

print "Enter a string:   ";
$sString = <STDIN>;

chomp($sString);

print "String = $sString\n";

$iLength = length($sString);
@array = split(//, $sString);

print "array = @array\n";

print "length = $iLength\n";
for ( $i = 1; $i <= $iLength; $i++ ){
$item = int(rand($#array));
print "@array[$item]\n";
}

Please any body help me.

thanks,

2

If you have perl 5.8.0 or later your should have shuffle. If you cannot use shuffle, why not?

3

The simplest way is to loop through the array swapping each item with another item in a random position. Note that the array is indexed from 0, not 1.

for ( $i = 0; $i < $iLength; $i++ ){
        $random = int(rand($#array));
        $temp=$array[$random];
        $array[$random]=$array[$i];
        $array[$i]=$temp;
}
for ( $i = 0; $i < $iLength; $i++ ){
        print "$array[$i]";
}
print "\n";
4

I hadn't heard of shuffle so I googled a bit.

perlfaq4 - perldoc.perl.org