Installation

pip install pnu-ngc

ngc(1)

NAME

ngc - n-grams count

SYNOPSIS

ngc [-b|--block] [-c|--convert ARGS] [-d|--discard ARGS] [-l|--length ARG] [-p|--partial ARG] [-q|--quiet] [-s|--summary] [-t|--text] [-w|--word] [--debug] [--help|-?] [--version] [--] [filename ...]

DESCRIPTION

The ngc utility is used for counting the number of occurrences and computing the frequency of n-grams in cryptanalysis.

For n=1, the n-gram is simply a letter or character. For n=2, the n-gram is called a bigram or digraph. And so on...

The -l option is for setting the length of the n-gram (the default is 1 character), and the -b option for using a fixed-window instead of the default sliding one ("ABCD" giving "AB" and "CD" instead of "AB", "BC" and "CD").

The -c option is used to perform some prior conversions on your input data: Unicode characters removal (especially accented ones), upper to lower case conversions (or the reverse), extra spaces removal (this last one is performed after other conversions).

You can also use the -d option to discard selected categories of characters (for example if you only want to keep letters).

If you want to check your input data after these transformations, you can use the -t option to print it.

If you want to print only this, you can use the -q option.

And if you want to print some stats on the remaining characters, you can print a summary with the -s option. This summary also includes the coincidence index of your input text.

Finally, you can use the -w option to process your input word by word instead of line by line. If you selected the fixed-window -b option, you can decide what to do with partial blocks with the -p option: between keeping them as-is, discarding them, or filling them with spaces in order to have only n-grams of the same length.

The ngc utility processes all the indicated file names as one file. If none are provided, it processes the standard input, thus behaving as a filter.

OPTIONS

ENVIRONMENT

The NGC_DEBUG environment variable can also be set to any value to enable debug mode.

EXIT STATUS

The ngc utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO

wc(1), caesar(1), Frequency analysis, Index of coincidence

STANDARDS

The ngc utility is not a standard UNIX/POSIX command.

It tries to follow the PEP 8 style guide for Python code.

HISTORY

This utility was made for The PNU project, while playing with a reimplementation of the caesar(1) utility.

LICENSE

This utility is available under the 3-clause BSD license.

AUTHORS

Hubert Tournier