love_letter_mystery.py

"""
Problem Statement
James found a love letter his friend Harry has written for his girlfriend. James is a prankster, so he decides to meddle with the letter. He changes all the words in the letter into palindromes.
To do this, he follows two rules:
He can reduce the value of a letter, e.g. he can change d to c, but he cannot change c to d.
In order to form a palindrome, if he has to repeatedly reduce the value of a letter, he can do it until the letter becomes a. Once a letter has been changed to a, it can no longer be changed.
Each reduction in the value of any letter is counted as a single operation. Find the minimum number of operations required to convert a given string into a palindrome.
Input Format
The first line contains an integer T, i.e., the number of test cases. 
The next T lines will contain a string each. The strings do not contain any spaces.
Constraints 
1≤T≤10 
1≤ length of string ≤104 
All characters are lower case English letters.
Output Format
A single line containing the number of minimum operations corresponding to each test case.
Sample Input
4
abc
abcba
abcd
cba
Sample Output
2
0
4
2
Explanation
For the first test case, abc -> abb -> aba.
For the second test case, abcba is already a palindromic string.
For the third test case, abcd -> abcc -> abcb -> abca = abca -> abba.
For the fourth test case, cba -> bba -> aba
"""
count = 0
def checkpalindrome(string, index, ascii_char):
    #abcd
    print "index: ", index, " asciichar: ", chr(ascii_char)
    global count
    original_string = string
    reversed_string = string[::-1]
    if reversed_string == string:
        return 
    else:
        if(original_string[index] == chr(ascii_char) and index > len(original_string)/2):
                checkpalindrome(original_string, index-1, ascii_char+1)
        else:
            print "else part"
            original_string[index] = chr(ord(original_string[index]) - 1)   
            print original_string[index]
            count = count + 1 
            checkpalindrome(original_string, index, ascii_char)



if __name__ == '__main__':
    n = input()
    string_array = []
    for i in range(n):
        input_string = raw_input()
        string_array.append(input_string)
    for string in string_array:
        print string
        checkpalindrome(list(string), len(string)-1, 97)
        print count
        count = 0