By now, nearly everyone has seen the widespread message that reads:
Aoccdrnig to a rsecheearr at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Translation:
According to a researcher at an English university, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that first and last letter is at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because we do not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.
As a practical joke for one of my clients, I decided to make a total mess out of their website using this tactic. Because I didn't want to spend a lot of time doing this and then fixing it again, I wrote a simple little function to help out.
The website in question got all it's text from a database and displayed that for the web visitor. This made the task quite easy to do and reverse! I simply added an extra function call to the output before displaying it (a single line) and then removed it to "fix" the site the way it was.
To see what this does, enter your sentence and check out the result!
<?php
/*
KOIVI Word Scrambler for PHP Copyright (C) 2004 Justin Koivisto
Version 2.0
Last Modified: 12/9/2004
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public
License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Full license agreement notice can be found in the LICENSE file contained
within this distribution package.
Justin Koivisto
justin.koivisto@gmail.com
http://koivi.com
*/
function wordScramble($x){
// split up the words and puctuation
$ar=preg_split('/\b/',$x);
// delete empty elements
foreach($ar as $y=>$z)
if(empty($z))
unset($ar[$y]);
$output=array();
foreach($ar as $word){
$elem=count($output)-1;
if(strlen($word)>3){
$word_start=substr($word,0,1); // first letter
$word_end=substr($word,-1); // last letter
$word_rest=substr($word,1,-1); //rest of the word
$word_rest_ar=array();
for($i=0;$i<strlen($word_rest);$i++){
// for each letter for the rest of the word
$word_rest_ar[]=substr($word_rest,$i,1);
}
shuffle($word_rest_ar);
$word=$word_start.join('',$word_rest_ar).$word_end;
}
$output[]=$word;
}
$find=array(" ' ",'( ',' )','{ ',' }','[ ',' ]',' .',' ?',' !',' , ');
$replace=array("'",'(',')','{','}','[',']','.','?','!',', ');
return preg_replace('/(\r\n|\r|\n){2}/',"\n",str_replace($find,$replace,join(' ',$output)));
}
?>
All code and scripts available for download on http://koivi.com are written by Justin Koivisto, ZCE and fall under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2.1 (unless noted otherwise). The full license agreement can be found within the LICENSE file within each distribution package.
© 2004 - Justin Koivisto, ZCE
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