CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonencryptionxor
gator
gator

Reputation: 3523

XOR file byte by byte, save output in ASCII?

I want to read a file character by character and XOR each byte with 172, then save as a new file.

I've made the following:

b = bytearray(open('in.txt', 'rb').read())
for i in range(len(b)):
    b[i] ^= 0xAC # XOR byte with 172
open('out.txt', 'wb').write(b)

Trying it on a sample text file:

ïÃÂËÞÍØÙÀÍØÅÃÂß

I end up with garbage:

oo/o.o'o2o!o4o5o,o!o4o)o/o.o3

The expected output is instead:

Congratulations

Doing this by hand, I get an expected output:

str(chr(0xEF ^ 0xAC)) # 'C', 'ï' XOR 172 = 67, 67 to ASCII is 'C'
str(chr(0xC3 ^ 0xAC)) # 'o'
str(chr(0xC2 ^ 0xAC)) # 'n'
...

But trying to automate it generates nonsense. Why doesn't it correctly work and how can I get my expected output?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 301

Answers (1)

dlask
dlask

Reputation: 8982

Your file in.txt doesn't use single-byte character encoding Windows-1254 as you expect but perhaps multibyte UTF-8 encoding.

Upvotes: 2

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