Help with function - encryption - messages - NameError: name 'message' is not defined

[deanhystad]

Did you want to do something like this?

shift = 10
message = encrypt(input("Message: "), shift)
print(message()
message = decrypt(message, shift)
print(message)

When you fix that error you will notice that encrypt and decrypt return empty strings. Inside the functions you are setting message="", so you are encrypting (or decrypting) an empty string regardless of what "message" you pass in.

Why did you write a decrypt() function? Look at encrypt() and decrypt() see any similarities? Is there potential for code reuse?

Finally, you can do this:

if c in alphabet:
    i = alphabet.index(c)
    j = (i + shift) % 26
    encrypted_message = encrypted_message + alphabet[j]
else:
    encrypted_message = encrypted_message + c

But why when you can do this:

# encrypt c if it is in alphabet, otherwise leave unchanged.
if c in alphabet:
    c = alphabet[(alphabet.index(c) + shift) % len(alphabet)]
encrypted_message += c

Avoid duplicate code when you can, even if it is as little as "encrypted_message = encrypted_message + "