Formatting Tool

[Anonymous]

Hiya!

I’m really new to the whole cipher thing, but getting into it I’ve started running into a really major roadblock. It’s to do with structure preservation.

Basically, text is split into chunks of 5/6 so that you can’t deduce stuff from word length. My problem then comes when it’s time to try and decode.

In a lot of ciphers, most notably the Vignere, it is extremely useful to be able to isolate the encrypted text in blocks of n, where n is some reasonably small integer. In the example of the Vignere, you can then quite easily read down columns to pick off every nth letter, and then run that through an Index of Coincidence, and work from there.

Does anyone know of any easy programs/ways to facilitate text format manipulation?

Many thanks!

[Anonymous]

I use python which you can access online with repl.it
You can get rid of spaces by doing <string>.replace(” “,””) (string must be surrounded by speech marks)
You can split it up into say 3 strings by running <string>[::3], <string>[1::3] and <string>[2::3]
Hope that helps

[Anonymous]

Thanks 67105112104101114 for the repl.it/ pointer. I shall have a closer look at that. 🙂

b.snomolos: I think that most folks cook their own string manipulators either in MS Excel, Python, or other programming languages. If you don’t want to program, then it’s worth becoming familiar with Excel formulae SUBSTITUTE and MID in particular.

[Anonymous]

Any text editor which supports regular expression in its search and replace functions will be able to do this.

[Anonymous]

{snip} For separating messages into blocks of n lengths, I use http://textmechanic.com/text-tools/basic-text-tools/addremove-line-breaks because you can put line breaks every n characters easily, and then convert those into spaces if you wish.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for the help!

In addition I’ve found another way to do it (just in case anyone else was looking for more ways).

Using a find and replace dialogue with an option for Wildcards (word has one, just remember not to have auto correct on if you’re using it for ciphering!).

Tick the Use Wildcards box,
In the find dialogue box type:
([A-Z]{2})
In the replace dialogue box type:
\1
(this has 1 space after it!)

That’s what I ended up using, thank you all for the help!
I dunno how to make this ^^ work with numbers, but if you really needed to you could split the text around the numbers and work from there I guess…

[Author]

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