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A unicode substitution cipher algorithm

Victoria Drake on January 07, 2018

Full transparency: I occasionally waste time messing around on Twitter. (Gasp! Shock!) One of the ways I waste time messing around on Twitter is by...

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Ben Halpern • Jan 7 '18

𝔻𝕒𝕞𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕚𝕤 𝕒 𝕗𝕦𝕟 𝕥𝕠𝕠𝕝

𝔸𝕞𝕒𝕫𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕛𝕠𝕓 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙 𝕒𝕝𝕝 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕍𝕚𝕔𝕜𝕪

Dave Cridland • Jan 8 '18 • Edited

>>> u''.join([ c if c == ' ' else unichr(ord(c) - 0x2352 + ord('A')) for c in s ])

I can never resist these things.

The three letter words were helpful - there's limited options there, so I thought aiming for an AND or a THE would be a good crib. The fact that you've left spaces unencoded does, of course, make this much simpler.

I do get, though, that this article isn't about cryptography. :-)

Victoria Drake • Jan 8 '18

Python3:

''.join([ c if c == ' ' else chr(ord(c) - 0x2352 + ord('A')) for c in s ])

I love this. Let's be secret code buddies.

Dave Cridland • Jan 8 '18

⍢⎄⎁⍴⌽⌯⍙⎄⎂⎃⌯⎁⍴⍼⍴⍼⍱⍴⎁⌯⎃⍾⌯⍴⍽⍲⍾⍳⍴⌯⎈⍾⎄⎁⌯⎂⍿⍰⍲⍴⎂⌯⍽⍴⎇⎃⌯⎃⍸⍼⍴⌽

Max Cerrina • Jan 8 '18

I feel so 𝓯𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂!

Mihail Malo • Feb 2 '19

I like this approach in node:

big = str => {
  const out = Buffer.from(str, "ucs2"),
    len = out.length
  for (let i = 0; i < len; i += 2) {
    const ascii = out[i]
    if (ascii < 0x21 || ascii > 0x7E) continue
    out[i] = ascii - 0x20
    out[i + 1] = 0xff
  }
  return out.toString("ucs2")
}
big("Big Chungus")