Ceaser cipher in Python

A Ceaser cipher is a basic encryption originating from the 1st century, invented by Julius Ceaser. It works by moving each letter a fixed position down or up the alphabet.
Here it is better explained by a diagram:

Now for the code in python 2.7, Firstly we will create a function for encoding so open a new file:
def encode(text)


Create an array to hold the new characters:
new_text = []

Now we need to loop through each character in the input text the user will give us:
for char in text:

ord converts a character to its numbered value in ascii.
In this case we will shift all the letters by 3 forward in the ascii table however you can use whatever number you want as long as it lower than 127:
char = ord(char) + 3

To make sure that we stay in the range of ASCII values we need to implement an if statement

if(char > 127):
    char = char - 127

Now to convert the value back to a character:
char = chr(char)

Then add this character to the array:
new_text.append(char)


We have reached the end of this function and now have to return the array to the program:
return new_array

You should now have your first function, which put together look like this:

def encode(text):
        new_text = []
        for char in text:
                char = ord(char) + 3
                if(char > 127):
                        char = char - 127
                char = chr(char)
                new_text.append(char)
        return new_text

The decode function works the same you just need to the opposite to decode instead of encode. I have made the changes in bold below.

def decode(text):
        new_text = []
        for char in text:
                char = ord(char) - 3
                if(char < 0):
                        char = char + 127
                char = chr(char)
                new_text.append(char)
        return new_text

We now need to allow the user to input some text and decide to encode or decode.
This can be done with a simple while loop and if/elif statment:

choice = 0
while choice != 3:
        choice = raw_input("1:Encode, 2:Decode, 3:Exit ")
        if(choice == "1"):
                user_input = raw_input("Enter a word: ")
                new_text = encode(user_input)
                print ''.join(new_text)
        elif(choice == "2"):
                user_input = raw_input("Enter a word: ")
                new_text = decode(user_input)
                print ''.join(new_text) 
        elif(choice == "3"):
                print "Goodbye"
        else:
                print "Please enter a correct choice"

Now lets see if it works

Checking the encoding works:
Choose 1 for encode then enter "hello, world" it should give the output of "khoor/#zruog"

Checking the decoding works:
Choose 2 for decode then enter "khoor/#zruog" it should give the output of "hello, world"