Proquabet

Turn your prose into a constant stream of encrypted and meaningless-sounding five-letter words!

What?

This will convert a string of text into ASCII or UTF-8 codes, and then each of those characters into a proquint, and vice versa.

I personally found the original paper kind of difficult to parse, so if that happens for you, try checking my wiki page on proquints to see if that helps, as it is a more step-by-step process/how-to.

Usage

Pass in the text via stdin to encode it by default, or use the -decode/--d flag to decode. e.g.

echo "Hello World!" | python3 main.py
# hodoj kudos kusob jitoz lanos kibod babap
echo "hodoj kudos kusob jitoz lanos kibod babap" | python3 main.py --d
# Hello World!

You can also add the -punctuation/--p flag to make the encoded output a little more like human-readable text using punctuation and capitalization. This is accounted for automatically on decoding.

echo "Hello World!" | python3 main.py --p
# Hodoj; kudos kusob jitoz lanos kibod babap?
echo "Hodoj; kudos kusob jitoz lanos kibod babap?" | python3 main.py --d
# Hello World!

This defaults to assuming standard ASCII text, which helps make a more interesting output. This can be changed to UTF-8 with the -unicode/--u flag.

echo "😎" | python3 main.py --u
# baluk-bumap

Flags

Why?

I was fascinated by proquints when I first saw them in icco's Go implementation. I've always been interested in codes and cryptography, so I once I understood how it worked, I figured to drill it further, I should do something silly with it. So here we are, back where we started but with MORE MATH.