Thread: Ideas

Try a simple cryptography program. Program works with a text file called, say, message.txt. User types his/her message in message.txt (with a simple ASCII text editor like MS Notepad). Your program is to read all the contents of this file, encrypt it, then spit the encrypted message back out to the same file.

Example Interface (command-line):
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Simple Encrypter
1. Encrypt message.txt
2. Decrypt message.txt

Selection =>
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So user can open message.txt, type a little message, run the program, hit '1' as a selection and when opening message.txt should see nothing but garbage. Conversely, selecting '2' on the next run, user should see the restored message when opening the file again. This could be kind of useful, you could encrypt your email messages this way (mind you, it will most likey be trivial to crack anyway)

Notes:
1. Making use of 2 files (one for input and one for output), will make the program a lot easier to implement. So you can choose either way, i just think 1 file makes the program look more cool.
2. Just use a simple encryption algorithm like add the value 5 to each character or something. If you want to make it a little more complex than you could add like a second algorithm to change the value you add to each character in a non-trivial fashion (i.e. using rand() or something; however you will need to save these values somehow when decrypting the message; could also make some oscillating function using sin() etc... so your values are reproducible on each run).
3. Whatever directory you run the program, the file "message.txt" (or whatever you want to call it) should be in that same directory (makes implementing easier, besides getting into full pathnames etc..)
4. If you need more details, or something else more interesting to program, feel free to ask.