Average of two strings in alphabetical/lexicographical order

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

Answer 1

This version thinks 'abc' is a fraction like 0.abc. In this approach space is zero and a valid input/output.

MAX_ITER = 10
letters = " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
def to_double(name):
    d = 0
    for i, ch in enumerate(name):
        idx = letters.index(ch)
        d += idx * len(letters) ** (-i - 1)
    return d

def from_double(d):
    name = ""
    for i in range(MAX_ITER):
        d *= len(letters)
        name += letters[int(d)]
        d -= int(d)
    return name

def avg(w1, w2):
    w1 = to_double(w1)
    w2 = to_double(w2)
    return from_double((w1 + w2) * 0.5)

print avg('a', 'a') # 'a'
print avg('a', 'aa') # 'a mmmmmmmm'
print avg('aa', 'aa') # 'a zzzzzzzz'
print avg('car', 'duck') # 'cxxemmmmmm'

Unfortunately, the naïve algorithm is not able to detect the periodic 'z's, this would be something like 0.99999 in decimal; therefore 'a zzzzzzzz' is actually 'aa' (the space before the 'z' periodicity must be increased by one.

In order to normalise this, you can use the following function

def remove_z_period(name):
    if len(name) != MAX_ITER:
        return name
    if name[-1] != 'z':
        return name
    n = ""
    overflow = True
    for ch in reversed(name):
        if overflow:
            if ch == 'z':
                ch = ' '
            else:
                ch=letters[(letters.index(ch)+1)]
                overflow = False
        n = ch + n
    return n

print remove_z_period('a zzzzzzzz') # 'aa'