Re: Rot13 and letters with accents

William J Poser <wjposer at ldc dot upenn dot edu> wrote:

> But then even better would be to Unicode-ify rot13 so that it affects 
> non-ASCII characters. For example, restricting ourselves to the BMP, 
> we could have rot7FFF, which would produce meaningless strings of CJK 
> characters from (extended) Latin text.

(This is not quite the same thing, but you might find it interesting 
nonetheless:
http://www.mindspring.com/~markus.scherer/unicode/base16k.html )

The elegance of rot13 for ASCII text is that it maps the two sets of 
letters (capital and small) to themselves, so that natural-language text 
ends up looking like (inscrutable) natural-language text rather than 
binary junk.  None of the other schemes such as rot47 do this.

Otto is on the right track: to make rot13 truly work for other scripts, 
you would have to define it individually for each script.  You might try 
rot24 for the Cyrillic sub-block from U+0400 to U+045F, for example. 
But this doesn't even work for Greek (unassigned code points in the 
middle of the rotated block) or Hebrew (rotated block not a multiple of 
2, so not self-inverting).

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
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