Introduction
ROT13 ("rotate by 13 places", sometimes hyphenated ROT-13) is a simple Caesar cipher used in online forums as a means of hiding spoilers, punchlines, puzzle solutions, and offensive materials from the casual glance. ROT13 has been described as the "Usenet equivalent of a magazine printing the answer to a quiz upside down".
ROT13 provides no real cryptographic security and is not used for such; in fact it is often used as the canonical example of weak encryption. An additional feature of the cipher is that it is symmetrical; that is, to undo ROT13, the same algorithm is applied, so the same action can be used for encoding and decoding.
Algorithm
Applying ROT13 to a piece of text merely requires examining its alphabetic characters and replacing each one by the letter 13 places further along in the alphabet, wrapping back to the beginning if necessary. A becomes N, B becomes O, and so on up to M, which becomes Z, then the sequence reverses: N becomes A, O becomes B, and so on to Z, which becomes M. Only those letters which occur in the English alphabet are affected; numbers, symbols, whitespace, and all other characters are left unchanged. Because there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 26 = 2 × 13, the ROT13 function is its own inverse.
In other words, two successive applications of ROT13 restore the original text.
Implementation
Code: PHP
function rot13( $text )
{
$codec_text = '';
$len = strlen($text);
for ( $i=0; $i < $len; $i++ )
{
$k = ord($text[$i]);
// 65-77 to 78-90 and 97-109 to 110-122
if ( ($k >= 65 && $k <= 77) || ($k >= 97 && $k <= 109) )
{
$codec_text .= chr($k+13);
}
// 78-90 to 65-77 and 110-122 to 97-109
elseif ( ($k >= 78 && $k <= 90) || ($k >= 110 && $k <= 122) )
{
$codec_text .= chr($k-13);
}
else
{
$codec_text .= chr($k);
}
}
return $codec_text;
}
