Talk:Vigenère cipher

There's four examples here, and no one seems to be having any trouble with the task description, so I'm going to remove the draft status from this one. Feel free to put it back if there are any objections. MagiMaster 03:25, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

A cool trick

It occurred to me that decoding is encoding with a different key. Specifically, the key can be modified by subtracting its letters' indices from 26. So a key of ABC will become ZYX. Then, encode the ciphertext with that new key to decode it. Here's some pseudo-code:

text = 'Hello'
key = 'ABC'
ciphertext = VigenereCipher(text, key)
comment ^ the ciphertext will be 'Hfnlp'

comment Now to decode:
For each character in key:
   alpha = ASCII_value_of_char(character)-65
   newAlpha = 26 - alpha
   newCharacter = Char_from_ASCII_value(newAlpha)
   append newCharacter to newKey

decoded = VigenereCipher(ciphertext, newKey)

This can shorten the AutoHotkey decipher function to 3 lines, and I'm pretty sure Python could pull off a one-liner using List Comprehensions.