Tell us what’s happening:
So I am on the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Projects: Caesars Cipher challenge, I seem to have figured it all out, apart from the final " shifting by 13 places" part of the code.
In my mind, it seems simple, get the ASCII code, substract 13, then back to string, but when I do this, I don’t get the desired result. So I google it, and it seems the solution is actually not to subtract 13 but instead "- 65 + 13) % 26) + 65
What!
I used this code and it worked, but why oh why. Why subtract 65, and then add 13?
what is the purpose of the %26?
If someone can kindly explain this to me, it would be greatly appreciated.
Your code so far
function rot13(str) {
var rotCharArray = [];
var regEx = /[A-Z]/;
str = str.split("");
// spliting the string to make it editable
for (var x in str) {
// looping though all characters
if (regEx.test(str[x])) {
// checking that is is an upper case letter
rotCharArray.push(((str[x].charCodeAt() - 65 + 13) % 26) + 65);
// litterly no idea how this calculation works, but I just know it does, maybe that is good enough?
} else {
rotCharArray.push(str[x].charCodeAt());
// push non-character back unchanges
}
}
str = String.fromCharCode.apply(String, rotCharArray);
return str;
//
}
console.log(rot13("SERR PBQR PNZC"));
function rot13(str) {
var rotCharArray = [];
var regEx = /[A-Z]/;
str = str.split("");
for (var x in str) {
if (regEx.test(str[x])) {
// A more general approach
// possible because of modular arithmetic
// and cyclic nature of rot13 transform
rotCharArray.push(((str[x].charCodeAt() - 65 + 13) % 26) + 65);
} else {
rotCharArray.push(str[x].charCodeAt());
}
}
str = String.fromCharCode.apply(String, rotCharArray);
return str;
}
// Change the inputs below to test
rot13("LBH QVQ VG!");
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User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.138 Safari/537.36.
Challenge: Caesars Cipher
Link to the challenge:
