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And this is why I love Mondays.
Part I through III: RegEx and Record IDs were definitely my friends here.
Part IV: Copied Part I-III and re-ran with second set of data.
This might be my favorite challenge ever, purely because it's a REAL one. SO COOL @TerryT!
Cheers (and I'll be back once I solve your dare, DO NOT WORRY, it will consume me until solved...),
NJ
EDIT: Finished Section III! :) Rather pleased with myself until I considered that I basically had the answer to begin with... and would have had no idea where to begin had I started without any clues. Also, I have definitely gone down the rabbit hole of Kryptos theory. CANNOT. STOP. ANALYZING.
Here's my solution for parts 1 - 4
Two bits I like in this challenge, which I've learnt from other weekly challenges:
1) Using the generate rows to create numbers and then using CharFromInt to then convert to a letter
2) Using Regex to tokenize and parse to rows
3) Using the modulo function to cycle through the wheels and then loop back to the start
Here's my solutions for Section 1 and Section 2.
I used iterative and batch macros throughout to make my solution flexible for different inputs, which made Section 2 a breeze! The only change was to add a Data Cleansing tool to remove the pesky punctuation.
@TerryT, Unless I'm missing something or perhaps cheating, from the starting point given, it's trivial to obtain the results desired for Section III. (The first two parts were excruciating and I cheerfully just studied other spoilers in order to learn the landscape; but Section III just seems to be sitting there plain as day... are we supposed to start from a different spot than the "Section III" text input provided?)
A-ha... I think the starting point needs to be that given here... then it's hard again. :-)
Excellent challenge @TerryT
Here's a spoiler free solution to sections I and II
The 3 outputs of Macro are
W=Vigenère Wheel Answer to Part I
T=Vigenère Table Answer to Part II
D=Decrypted text Answer to Part III
Section III will have to wait until I get a little more free time
On an unrelated note: the original version of my macro fell afoul of the issue raised by @cmcclellan here. Essentiallly, the generate rows tool had an initialization expression of "A" used Char<="Z" (uppercase Z) as the Condition Expression, while using the CharFrom\ToInt functions to increment the Char. When I ran this version, the loop stopped not at "Z" but at "z", implying that lowercase "z" was used to test the condition. Anyone else have this issue?
Dan
