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Took a short crack at Part II, but after realizing my route didn't really offer a solution without building a macro I decided to stop there.
Bit of brute force on Part II since I haven't learned iterative macros yet, but I got it and it is replicable. I have to admit, I am impressed with Caesar's command of the English language. The man was truly ahead of his time
Process:
- Created input table with ROT-13 transformation
- RegEx on "." split to rows
- Find and Replace message to ROT-13
- Summarize concatenation (with no separators) to see answer to message
- Find and Replace message to ROT-13 to ensure transfers back
- Join to ensure message is same as original
Part II:
Process:
- Created a brute force table with all 26 transformations
- RegEx on "." split to rows
- Add RecordIDs (not needed)
- Filter for various ROTs (iterated by hand)
- Find and Replace message to ROT chosen
- Summarize concatenation (with no separators) to see answer to message
I didn't feel like making a macro so I approached part 2 by parsing the string into individual characters, transposing this so that there is a single character per line, and then joining based on both the ROT-number and the actual character to be decoded. I then looked for "Caesar" to identify the correct results (as it was supposed to be signed).
Well, I don't think I'll ever forget lowercase chars are numbered 97-122 now.
What's great about this is it can encode/decode thousand-page documents in the same amount of time (or less) what Caesar's army would've spent decoding his 20-letter message.
