This post is Part 3 of a three part series:

Using the Vignere Cipher to Encrypt a Message (Part 1)

Using the Vignere Cipher to Encrypt a Message (Part 2)

Using the Vignere Cipher to Encrypt a Message (Part 3) <– You are here

In Part 1, I gave a brief overview of the Vignere cipher and discussed the two approaches to solving it (the two approaches that I could come up with - there are definitely others). In Part 2, I covered the first approach, which is essentially a Caesar cipher with a dynamic shift number. In this part, I’m going to step through the more interesting solution - the way it’s really intended to be done - using the magical Vignere table.

A Vignere table looks like this:

Don’t worry about deciphering this now, you’ll gain a deeper understanding as I go over the code to build this thing.

The process breaks down into four primary functions: the generateAlphabet function, the generateVignereTable function, the encodeWithTable function, and of course the vignereCipherWithTable function.

In high-level pseudocode, we want to:

1) Generate an alphabet starting with a given letter (a in the first column, b in the second, etc) - note: the alphabet must wrap around to the beginning when it reaches z 2) Generate a Vignere table - The keys consist of the standard alphabet (a-z) - Each key's value is an alphabet starting with that key and wrapping back around to a (each value is 26 letters) 3) Encode the message by looking up each letter of the original message in the keys of the Vignere table, then traversing the table to get the value from the character code of the keyword letter 4) Put it all together in the final function

Step 1: Build the generateAlphabet function

In this function, the parameter will be a starting index. We are going to iterate over twenty-six char codes, starting at the provided start index. Presumably, the first char code will be 97, and they will go up from there. In order to account for char codes over 122, we add some if/else logic into the String.fromCharCode method. Ternary operators allow us to keep this code succinct.

function generateAlphabet ( start ) { let alphabet = []; //from start index to 26 chars later for ( let i = start ; i < start + 26 ; i ++ ) { //convert the char code into a letter and push it to the alphabet array alphabet . push ( String . fromCharCode ( i > 122 ? i - 26 : //if char code > 122, return code - 26, else i < 97 ? i + 26 : //if char code < 97, return code + 26, else i //just return the code )); } return alphabet ; //return the alphabet array }

Step 2: Build the generateVignereTable function

Dedicating a function to generating alphabets with different starting character codes allows us to keep the Vignere table function surprisingly simple.

All we need to do is instantiate an empty object, table . Load the keys of that object up with the standard alphabet, starting with the letter ‘a’ (char code 97). Then for each key in the table, we generate an alphabet that starts at the key’s index. So the second key (‘b’) has an alphabet starting with b and wrapping back around to end with a. The third key (‘c’) has an alphabet starting with c and wrapping back around to end with b. And so on.

In code:

//generate an object, where each key is a letter and each value is another alphabet function generateVignereTable () { let table = {}; //instantiate a temporary object to hold the table table . keys = generateAlphabet ( 97 ); //set the keys of the object equal to the standard alphabet (starting at 97) table . keys . forEach (( key , index ) => { table [ key ] = generateAlphabet ( 97 + index ) }); //set the value of each key as the alphabet return table ; //return the table }

Step 3: Encode each character using a Vignere table

This is the most important step in the solution - the piece where we put our Vignere table to use. See the comments for a line-by-line explanation.

function encodeWithTable ( message , keywordStr ) { let messageArray = message . split ( '' ); //split the message into an array let keywordArray = keywordStr . split ( '' ); //split the keyword string into an array messageArray . forEach (( letter , index ) => { //for each letter and index in the message array let messageChar = letter ; //make a temp variable to hold the letter let keywordChar = keywordArray [ index ]; //get the corresponding letter from the keyword string using the index let keywordCharIndex = keywordChar . charCodeAt ( 0 ) - 97 ; //get the index of the keyword by subtracting 97 from the charcode let vignereTable = generateVignereTable (); //create a vignere table let cipherChar = vignereTable [ messageChar ][ keywordCharIndex ]; //look up the corresponding letter in the table messageArray [ index ] = cipherChar ; //replace the letter in the message with the cipher letter }); return messageArray . join ( '' ); //convert the messageArray back to a string and return it }

Step 4: The Actual Function

Since we’ve taken the time to break down our problem and write thorough helper functions, the cipher function itself is nothing special. In fact, it’s identical to the function in Part 2, except now we are encoding with the Vignere table, rather than with the boring old Caesar cipher.

function vignereCipherWithTable ( message , keyword = "lemon" ) { for ( let i = 0 ; i < message . length ; i ++ ) { keyword += keyword ; // repeat the keyword a bunch of times } let keywordStr = keyword . substr ( 0 , message . length ); // cut the keyword string so it's the same length as the message let ciphertext = encodeWithTable ( message , keywordStr ); // encode the string using the vignere table return ciphertext //return the cipher text! }

And there you have it! Have fun passing secret messages back and forth with your friends…good luck decoding them though… ;)

Hope this was enjoyable and helpful. Shoot me an email or tweet at me with comments, questions, complaints, and suggestions. Comments section coming soon! Contact info in footer.