Bitswitching Encryption not working

[Geo-Fry]

ok first of all im not even sure its called bit switching, but whatever it is, it wont work
the problem is, if i do the opposite of whatever i did to encrypt some text, it wont be back normal. im at school and dont have my code right now, but it was something to this effect:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main()
{
   char a[10];
   cin >> a;
   a >> 1;
   a += 5;
   cout << a << "\n";
   a -= 5;
   a << 1;
   cout << a << "\n";
   system("Pause");
   return 0;
}

and it didnt work. then i figured that maybe the bitswitching was "pushing the character off the edge", or trying to make it go farther than the ascii characters go, and so there might be several characters there, and thus there might not be a unique character for each character they type in. maybe that doesnt sound very clear, but what i was trying to say was that i think bitswitching seems unreliable. how can i encrypt something in such a way that:
a: it will be somewhat difficult to crack (not like a += 1 and thats it)
2. i can unencrypt it with out problems
iii- preferably, i wont have to write out a huge amount of code
four~ i can use some sort of key/password thingy like other encryption uses i have seen.
thank you for your help, and have a nice summer (unless you live south of the equator, cause dont they have winter now? that sucks, i hate winter)

[7stud]

It's called "bit shifting". Suppose 'a' looked like this:

111

and then you performed a>>1

that would give you:

011

Now if you tried to reverse that with a<<1, you would get:

110

which does not equal 111. The bitwise shift operators shift in zeros from the left and right. If that's your definition of "unreliable", then the bitwise shift operators are indeed unreliable. I like to think they are "reliable" because on Tuesday, they operate the same way as they did on Monday.

[7stud]

Check out the XOR bitwise operation here for some simple encrypting:

http://www.juicystudio.com/tutorial/cpp/bitwise.html

[Zach L.]

Originally posted by Salem

The only information-preserving thing you can do is exclusive-or.

Not entirely true. You can do rotations, but thats not a primitive operation.

char rotate_left(char x, int amt)
{
    return (x << amt) | (x >> (sizeof(x) - amt));
}

[Zach L.]

I suppose it should be really
return (x << amt) | (x >> ((sizeof(x)*CHAR_BIT) - amt));

Good call. Can't believe I missed that.