Question

I am a newbie and seeking for the Zen of Python 🙂 Today’s koan was finding the most Pythonesq way to solve the following problem:

Permute the letters of a string pairwise, e.g.

input:  'abcdefgh'
output: 'badcfehg'

Answer 1

I’d go for:

s="abcdefgh"
print "".join(b+a for a,b in zip(s[::2],s[1::2]))

s[start:end:step] takes every step’th letter, zip matches them up pairwise, the loop swaps them, and the join gives you back a string.