TCL des: Return encrypted phrase in standard ascii characters

Question

I'm using DES in TCL to encrypt some phrases and I want to store those encrypted phrases in some ascii files which I need to manipulate easily. Therefore, I would like the "encrypted phrase" to be constituted only of standard ascii characters (preferentially with no spaces).

I'm using something like this to ecrypt:

set encrypted [ DES:des -dir encrypt -key "abcdefgh" "This_phrase" ]

I would like "encrypted" to be a standard ascii code, not something that, as it happens, may even brake my terminal if displayed.

Thank you very much. Leandro.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '12 at 17:57

5

You could either replace all characters that might have a special meaning (everything except a-zA-Z0-9 etc) or encode it with e.g. base64.

set encrypted [base64::encode -wrapchar {} [DES:des -dir encrypt -key abcdefgh "This_phrase"]]

You need to strip the extra layer (base64, escape sequence encoding or whatever you used to convert the binary data to ascii) if you want to decode it.

answered Dec 17 '12 at 17:57

Johannes Kuhn

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Thank you very much, the "base64" encoding worked beautifully. – leandro Dec 17 '12 at 18:44
1

The `-hex` option to `DES::des` is another option. It's more verbose though, as it uses a smaller alphabet than base64. – Donal Fellows Dec 17 '12 at 23:28

TCL des: Return encrypted phrase in standard ascii characters

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