Rail Fence

A mildly complicated one where you align letters on different rows and then squish the letters together in order to create your ciphertext.

When you rearrange your text in a “wave” sort of pattern (moving down, then up, then down, etc.), it is called a rail fence. Take the text “WAFFLES FOR BREAKFAST” and arrange its letters in waves like the diagram below. Note that spaces are removed because they often get in the way.

W       O       A
 A     F R     F S
  F   S   B   K   T
   F E     R A
    L       E → WOA
AFRFS
FSBKT
FERA
LE

Next, squish each line together. I added a space between the condensed lines.

WOA AFRFS FSBKT FERA LE

The default settings preserve the original spaces and punctuation and will not move capitalization with the transposed letter. This means only letters are shuffled and everything else will remain where it was. This can be changed, but try to remember that it is difficult for receivers to decode messages when two spaces happen to end up next to each other. To see what I mean, look at the third example.

Examples:

  • - “Waffles for breakfast”, as shown above.
  • - This is the reversed form of the Morse code message “ETUNIASEGSMTEVNAULIOELL”.
  • - Shows off how difficult it can be to decode messages with multiple spaces. Try to find the spaces after the encoded text. If you use the option to encode all characters, please make sure you test how the recipient can view and decode the message.