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JP Antunes
JP Antunes

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Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's

The /r/portugal sub-reddit can be a surprising little place. Today someone asked if the message in the cover picture was some form of encrypted text.

Well, it's a Caesar's cipher with ROT1, which is a simple dictionary substitution cipher and we can easily come up with encrypt/decrypt functions by mapping the character index in the source message's alphabet to the destination's.

//first we need to define our regular alphabet const alphaB = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' //now the rot1 alphabet, ie our regular alphabet shifted by one place const rot1 = 'ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY' //our encrypt/ decrypt functions use the same logic but invert the source and target alphabets const caesarsEnc = str => [...str].map(e => alphaB[rot1.indexOf(e)]) const caesarsDec = str => [...str].map(e => rot1[alphaB.indexOf(e)]) 

The functions only work with capital letters, but it's enough for our purposes.

const myMsg = 'HELLO WORLD'; > caesarsEnc(myMsg).map(e => e !== undefined ? e : ' ').join('') 'IFMMP XPSME' const mySecretMsg = 'IFMMP XPSME' > caesarsDec(mySecretMsg).map(e => e !== undefined ? e : ' ').join('') 'HELLO WORLD' 

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