However after I load the image

I don’t know what to do next. I tried to exam the various attributes of the image, but got nothing.

Think it again on “It really looks like a Y, isn’t it? now, go back. ” at http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/y.html. What if the zip goes back? Hmmm, it should looks like a “1″ or “l”. then I tried http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/l.html because “1.html” has already been taken. OK, something there! “yes. but there are more. ” Good! I tried 2, 3, 6, 33 “l”s and several combination with “w”, “o”, and “0″, but all 404.

I think now the problem is to find out how many “l”s are there. I tried every attributes of ImageStat but they are all tooooo big. No more hint. I think I should wait the next time.

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The unpickling is as easy as it should:

f = open(”banner.p”, “r”)
x = pickle.load(f)
But after that I was lost. x is a list of lists, with 23 items, each item are constructed with one or more tuples, each tuple has two elements: one ” ” or “#”, and one number. What should I do with this?

I re-read the pickle documents several times and there looks no other thing I can do.

The HTML said “pickle banner.p”. Should I pickle it instead of unpickle it? I pickled x with different protocols, but protocol 1 and 2 produced binary output, that I can’t understand.

The first and last elements of x are all [” “, 95]. So these should be the same letter. But 95 in ASCII is “_”. What’s that?

The file name is “banner.p”. Is this related? There’s no banner in the picture. Wait… The pic!

I looked through the hex of the JPG but found the number in x doesn’t mean a position as I thought: there are too many small numbers ([0-9]).

a

doesn’t help. The numbers are odd.

then

And i was caught by the first several lines:

There looks there are some patern in it… Yes, the number in each line adds up the same! It’s 95! So the ” ” and “#” must be standing for something, like 0 and 1!… Or is this a bitmap picture?

for i in x:
for j in i:
f2.write(j[0]*j[1])
f2.write(”\n”)

f2.close()
And I got in the file out: channel ! The Challenge 6 is at http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/channel.html !

Finially I understand what the “banner” mean, the out put in file out looks like the output of command banner

Finially I got this. Now challenge 6:

The title is “now there are pairs”. There’s no hint. Again there’s some hint in the HTML source: zip. I know there’s a gzip module and a zipfile module. But what are they expecting me to do? Zip the picture? Or the HTML file?

Well I’ve spend too much time on this today so let’s wait for tomorrow. Things are getting harder, and more interesting

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There’s an extra “<—” in the HTML comment. I believe this is pointing me what to zip. But after I tried zip “html”, “<html”, the whole THML source file, the jpg image, all gave nothing.

I stared at the page again and found the zip looks like a “Y”, so I tried http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/y.html. There’s something there! “It really looks like a Y, isn’t it? now, go back.”

There’s some other thing in the picture! Stared at it again and I found on the top right corner there’s a “<—” like sign pointing to something like “333333″ or “wwwwww”. But http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/333333.html http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/wwwwww.html

All gave nothing.

I also noticed there are chars on the button, “sprint”, and there are something looks like chars in the middle of the zip, something like an “o” or 0, and something like “v”. I tried several combinations but they all gave me 404.

I think the problem is in the title: “now there are pairs”. What does this mean? There’s no “pair” module in the library. The “zip” hint should be related the zip modules or the zip in the picture.

I also tried “yy.html” and several double letters, no luck again.

Wait, there is a PIL module! I’ve heared about it doing things about picture but never use it. Think about the “Peak Hell” and “pickle” thing yesterday. I think this is a pretty good guess.

Well I’ve got PIL installed today. I think I’d leave the document reading to tomorrow. The document is at http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/

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def followNothing(url):
page=urllib.urlopen(url)
pagecontent = page.read()
print pagecontent
result =re.search(”[0-9]{5}”, pagecontent)
if result:
num = pagecontent[result.start():result.end()]
nexturl = “http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=” + num
followNothing(nexturl)
else:
print “fix the script!”
and I got:

OK, it’s not necessary to be 5 numbers.

def followNothing(url):
page=urllib.urlopen(url)
pagecontent = page.read()
print pagecontent
result =re.search(”[0-9]+”, pagecontent)
if result:
num = pagecontent[result.start():result.end()]
nexturl = “http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=” + num
followNothing(nexturl)
else:
print “fix the script!”
and…

OK,

def followNothing(url):
page=urllib.urlopen(url)
pagecontent = page.read()
print pagecontent
result =re.search(”next nothing is [0-9]+”, pagecontent)
if result:
num = pagecontent[result.start()+16:result.end()]
nexturl = “http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=” + num
followNothing(nexturl)
else:
print “fix the script!”
And after a long time…

I visited http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=46059 and found it’s still “and the next nothing is 33110″

Don’t know what the pattern is so just do it manually this time: call followNothing(”http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=33110″)

OK, challenge 5 is at http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/peak.html

The hint is “pronounce it”, the title is “peak hell”. Vies the page source and there is another hint: “peak hell sounds familiar ? ”

Well I’m not a native speaker so I first look throu the module names. And I found pickle visit http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/pickle.html and it told me “yes! pickle!”. No title, no more hints, no more source. What’s going on?

So I took a look at the source of http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/peak.html again and found a wired line:

Give http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/banner.p a vist and got a mess. I think I’ll need to unpickling this mess tomorrow.

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target = re.compile(r”[!A-Z][A-Z]{3}([a-z])[A-Z]{3}[!A-Z]”)

f = open(”mess.txt”, “r”)

myout = target.findall(f.read())
And I got this:

What’s this? Checked the mess again and there’s no punctuation in it. Is the URL so long?

The loooooong.html doesn’t work. Should I ignore the “\n”?

Wait.. that “!” in the RE!… I’ve been in C these days

So here is the next version:

target = re.compile(r”[^A-Z][A-Z]{3}([a-z])[A-Z]{3}[^A-Z]”)

f = open(”mess.txt”, “r”)

myout = “”.join(target.findall(f.read()))
And I got

OK, http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.html ! It told me to go to http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php. This is Challenge 4!

There’s no hint in Challenge 4. The title is “follow the chain”. Well, I clicked on the image and it brings me to http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=12345 “and the next nothing is 92512″. OK, http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=92512. OK, 64505. 50010, 29193, …

Wait, on http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/linkedlist.php?nothing=64505, it says “Your hands are getting tired and the next nothing is 50010″. I didn’t notice this and keep following the numbers for a while. Now I think I should make a script to do it. Tomorrow

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OK, it says to find the rare chars, so here is my first try:

ss = {}

for c in f.read():
if ss.has_key(c):
ss[c] += 1
else:
ss[c]=1
And here is the output:

I tried http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/aeilqtuy.html and got a 404. I think I need to preserve the order. Anyway they are all lower case chars so

f = open(”mess.txt”, “r”)

out = [c for c in f.read() if c in string.ascii_lowercase]
And here is what I got:

http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/equality.html, got it!

The hit is: One small letter, surrounded by EXACTLY three big bodyguards on each of its sides.

The title is “re”. So this is re related. But I don’t know what the hit means and decided to take a look at the page source. Ah, there’s a mess in there, again!

So tomorrow, I’ll use re to search the mess and find some patien, maybe a lower case surounded by three upper case or something similiar.

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Look again at the pic and I think I found what’s in it: int(k)+2 = m, int(o)+2 = q, int(e)+2 = g. I think this is it.

It took me some time cause Python don’t do the type cast as we do in c/cpp. I checked the manual with keyword like “char” “ascii” and found curses.ascii and binascii. The curses.ascii might be some help but not what I want. Finally I found str() and ord(). So here is the first version:

def add2(s):
return [chr(ord(i)+2) for i in s]
Ooops, it print one char per line.

So here is the second version:

def add2(s):
return “”.join([chr(ord(i)+2) for i in s])
I got

Hmm, I should make that in one line and convert alphas only.

Wait… I saw something about string in it. Let me check the document…

OK, I’ve found string.maketrans() and string.translate(). So here is the third version:

sentence = “\
g fmnc wms bgblr rpylqjyrc gr zw fylb. rfyrq ufyr amknsrcpq ypc dmp. bmgle gr \
gl zw fylb gq glcddgagclr ylb rfyr’q ufw rfgq rcvr gq qm jmle. sqgle \
qrpgle.kyicrpylq() gq pcamkkclbcb. lmu ynnjw ml rfc spj. \
”

trans = string.maketrans(”abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”,
“cdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzab”)

def add2(s):
return string.translate(s, trans)
And now

OK, I’ve got it!

So the next challenge is at http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/ocr.html

One more thing about this challenge: the title is “What about making trans?”. That is a hint too.

Now challenge 2: the hint is “recognize the characters. maybe they are in the book, but MAYBE they are in the page source.” View the html source and found “find rare characters in the mess below:” and some mess of characters. This looks like base64 or uuencoded. Let’s wait for tomorrow.

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The hint is “look at the URL address.”. OK, this is challenge 0 and the url is 0.html. So I changed it to 1.html.

There is a page there! It shows “2**38 is much much larger.”. OK I know what the “238″ in the pic mean. Load IPython and give 2**38, I get 274877906944L. So I changed the name to 274877906944L.html. “the L in unnecessary”. OK, 274877906944.html.

I got it! now the challenge 1 url: http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/map.html

There are “k->m, o->q, e->g” in the pic and the hint is “everybody thinks twice before solving this.”

There are some sentence at the end. The first glance is that to replace the “k,o,e” in the sentence, but what does “think twice” mean? Let’s wait for tomorrow.

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