Answer the following question:
Tni eeesms laslo rmlf orgt si h aehr.Wowstecarupr ntemntrmtha ibeo ewe se n au?thMdarnInetbndlmWt ca eso h ieim ih h a h ee scets a,hi tte ofko ywatu erfrsne
Mohamed Lahyani.
The question has been encoded using the Wimbledon cipher and can be decoded as:
Tennis referees must always look from left to right, as is the case here. Who was the chair umpire in the monster match at Wimbledon between Isner and Mahut?
The Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships1 is the longest tennis match in history. In total the match between John Isner2 and Nicolas Mahut3 took 11 hours, 5 minutes of play over three days (June 22, 23 and 24), with a final score of 6–4, 3–6, 6–7(7–9), 7–6(7–3), 70–68 for a total of 183 games. John Isner finally won the game. It remains by far the longest match in tennis history, measured both by time and number of games. The final set alone was longer than the previous longest match. Both players broke numerous Wimbledon and tennis records, including each serving over 100 aces, with the match being referred to as "the endless match".
The chair umpire throughout the match was the Swedish official Mohamed Lahyani. Lahyani said afterwards that he was so "gripped by the amazing match" that his concentration stayed solid and he did not think about eating or going to the toilet. On the second day of the match, two groups of 14 linespeople and four groups of 28 ballboys and ballgirls were used in a rotation. At the end of the match, Lahyani announced the score incorrectly, accidentally switching the scores of the two tie-break sets.
Assignment
Decoding a text fragment that has been encoded using the Wimbledon cipher boils down to taking the first character, the last character, the second character, the penultimate character, the third character, and so on.
Your task:
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Write a function decode that takes a message (str) that was encoded using the Wimbledon cipher. The function must return the original message (str).
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Write a function encode that takes a message (str). The function must return the encoded version of the given message (str), where encoding is done using the Wimbledon cipher.
Example
>>> decode('Oea ie.mtat n')
'One at a time.'
>>> decode("W'entwies u o,cnw ev.erse a ybtb,rta o re")
"We're not waiters, but boy, can we serve."
>>> decode('Dtn enspae srsy oemasntigt s.uo nho ne vL.ki iryl intagia')
'Dating a tennis player is risky. Love means nothing to us.'
>>> encode('One at a time.')
'Oea ie.mtat n'
>>> encode("We're not waiters, but boy, can we serve.")
"W'entwies u o,cnw ev.erse a ybtb,rta o re"
>>> encode('Dating a tennis player is risky. Love means nothing to us.')
'Dtn enspae srsy oemasntigt s.uo nho ne vL.ki iryl intagia'
Epilogue
