Token cleaner

Turns an authentication token into a similar looking, but obviously fake token.

This is useful for documentation or sample configuration files, where you want to have a similar "look" but don't want to put a real token.

Takes a real token like: "b45HoPmm4HG" and makes a "fake" token that looks like "a01BcDef2GH"

Usage:

$ python clean.py b45HoPmm4HG
a01BcDef2GH

How it works:

We start by getting the input (using sys.argv for now). We also define the skip array, which holds the characters we want to skip and define a clean variable, which will hold our "cleaned" output:

dirty = sys.argv[1]
skip = ['-', '/']
clean = ''

Next we define a list_spinner generator, which allows you to "spin" through an array of elements, one by one, using the next() method:

def list_spinner(input_list, initial_offset=0):
    offset = initial_offset
    while True:
        if (offset + 1) > len(input_list):
            offset = initial_offset
        yield(input_list[offset])
        offset += 1

letters = list_spinner(list(string.ascii_lowercase))
numbers = list_spinner(list(string.digits))
symbols = list_spinner(list(string.punctuation))

Finally, we iterate through each character in the "dirty" input to produce a "cleaned" output, by detecting the type of input character and selecting a replacement character from the next() character in the list of the input character type:

for char in dirty:
    if char in skip:
        rv = char
    elif char.islower():
        rv = letters.next()
    elif char.isupper():
        rv = letters.next().upper()
    elif char.isdigit():
        rv = numbers.next()
    else:
        rv = symbols.next()
    clean += str(rv)

print(clean)