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 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; }
rot 13 is also one of the easiest to crack even without using a script. By Identifying the most used letters and the single characters you can usually decipher say about 40% on just visual inspection. Please do not rely on it to encrpyt or hid secret notes...
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.[2] 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
