ROT-13 Generator

A bit of Background

Hi all! If you are new to encryption you might be wondering just what this ROT-13 thing is.

Basically it is quite simple. Indeed, ROT-13 is probably the simplest coding scheme known to anyone using the basic 26 character english alphabet (this is important - it's even possible that you've guessed where we're going :-)).

The ROT-13 coding scheme is basically, at heart, a substitution code: it takes a letter and replaces it with another further along the alphabet, or it rotates the letter. In this particular case, it goes 13 characters along, so that if the original character is an 'A', the coded letter will be 'N' and so on. It wraps round so that letters N - Z are represented by the letters A - M. The BIG advantage of ROT-13 is that it is self-decoding - that is, the same routine that creates the coded data will create the uncoded data as well

The Program

ROT-13, the program, is a simple utility that enables you to input a piece of text either coded or not - in the first case you will get the clear text message, or else you will get the coded text

The screen looks like:

ROT-13 screen

Much of the above should be fairly obvious.

Original - the text you want translating
ROT-13 - the translated text
From Clipboard - if you have copied text to the clipboard, clicking this will copy that text into the Original edit box. Any text already there will be cleared
Translate - click this to perform the translation
To Clipboard - copies the ROT-13 text back to the clipboard from where it can be copied into any other application.
Close - closes the application

As with any Windows applications, pressing Ctrl & underlined character will action that command.

The program has been tested on Windows 95, 98 and Windows 2000.

Download here

Limitations of the Program

First, the obvious one: this is a Windows application. It will not run on Linux, any other Unixes, or Macintosh Operating systems without emulations. The basic conversion routine should work, but the copy & paste routines may not, under emulators. This has NOT been tested!

The routine itself will only work on the characters A - Z (upper or lowercase). Numbers and other characters are unaffected.

The original structure of any sentence is maintained.

The number of characters to be translated should be limited to 255 characters for now.

A warning about the coding scheme.

ROT-13 is probably the weakest coding scheme on the planet - some people claim to read it almost as easily as standard English. It's main use is in obfusicating the meaning of a particular piece of text, not for properly encrypting it so don't rely on it for serious encryption purposes!


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