Question

Suppose you take the strings ‘a’ and ‘z’ and list all the strings that come between them in alphabetical order: [‘a’,’b’,’c’ … ‘x’,’y’,’z’]. Take the midpoint of this list and you find ‘m’. So this is kind of like taking an average of those two strings.

You could extend it to strings with more than one character, for example the midpoint between ‘aa’ and ‘zz’ would be found in the middle of the list [‘aa’, ‘ab’, ‘ac’ … ‘zx’, ‘zy’, ‘zz’].

Might there be a Python method somewhere that does this? If not, even knowing the name of the algorithm would help.

I began making my own routine that simply goes through both strings and finds midpoint of the first differing letter, which seemed to work great in that ‘aa’ and ‘az’ midpoint was ‘am’, but then it fails on ‘cat’, ‘doggie’ midpoint which it thinks is ‘c’. I tried Googling for “binary search string midpoint” etc. but without knowing the name of what I am trying to do here I had little luck.

I added my own solution as an answer

Answer 1

If you define an alphabet of characters, you can just convert to base 10, do an average, and convert back to base-N where N is the size of the alphabet.

alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

def enbase(x):
    n = len(alphabet)
    if x < n:
        return alphabet[x]
    return enbase(x/n) + alphabet[x%n]

def debase(x):
    n = len(alphabet)
    result = 0
    for i, c in enumerate(reversed(x)):
        result += alphabet.index(c) * (n**i)
    return result

def average(a, b):
    a = debase(a)
    b = debase(b)
    return enbase((a + b) / 2)

print average('a', 'z') #m
print average('aa', 'zz') #mz
print average('cat', 'doggie') #budeel
print average('google', 'microsoft') #gebmbqkil
print average('microsoft', 'google') #gebmbqkil

Edit: Based on comments and other answers, you might want to handle strings of different lengths by appending the first letter of the alphabet to the shorter word until they’re the same length. This will result in the “average” falling between the two inputs in a lexicographical sort. Code changes and new outputs below.

def pad(x, n):
    p = alphabet[0] * (n - len(x)) 
    return '%s%s' % (x, p)

def average(a, b):
    n = max(len(a), len(b))
    a = debase(pad(a, n))
    b = debase(pad(b, n))
    return enbase((a + b) / 2)

print average('a', 'z') #m
print average('aa', 'zz') #mz
print average('aa', 'az') #m (equivalent to ma)
print average('cat', 'doggie') #cumqec
print average('google', 'microsoft') #jlilzyhcw
print average('microsoft', 'google') #jlilzyhcw