Wat kinda trickery is dat ?

Agreed, I had thought about this but understood that it wouldn't cut the mustard.

This solution is illegal

no the int() function converts from any number system to decimal. if you wanted to convert to, say, binary you'd have to use the bin() function.

OHhh ok. Thank you for the expanation. Just one more question, is the output from the int function always in base 10 or is there a 3rd parameter we can give the function to output the convertion in other base systems?

int converts a data type to integer. It can convert strings of numbers from other number base systems via the second optional input for the function. Eg: int("1001",2) == 9 because it is converting a base-2 string of numbers into denary. In this case, 16 was used because hexadecimal is a base-16 number system.

Can anybody explain the role of int() here. I didn't know that int can take in more than one parameter. Sorry, new to programming here

or '--5'

hex is built-in function. You should not make any variables with this name.

Add replace('.','',1)

what happens if the translation table contains more characters that just vowels...? And what happens if you need to update the translation table...? You would need change each function manually

It looks good, but "replace" is not very effective in terms of speed just for the future)))