unforum

[blag]

There's also a programming language called PEARL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEARL_programming_language
(high-level language designed for multitasking and real-time programming, different from "Perl")

Compiled code?

[Rolerbe]

[wisdomwarrior]

[blag]

Hang on - it's not the mother of all regular expressions, is it?

Perl is very often used to manipulate regex...

[Medemia]

Upon entering

[fimacmo]

I did start doing this but got a string of rubbish; also, which keyboard? US, UK is there a separate Eirean one?

[dickeja8]

In response to my email with "The Pearl" as the subject line, I got the email about programming languages.

Because of the repeated patterns of symbols, I'm not so sure that each symbol is a single letter. If that's the case there would be instances where the message says things like "dog dog plays dog the plays", based on the patterns I found last night. Plus, with 339 total characters and an average word length of 6 letters, the message would be 56 words long.

But I don't have any better ideas at this point.

found this on perl: http://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Unix/regex.php

and this: http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/littperl/perlreg.htm

It seems that =~ (characters 3 and 4) have a significant meaning. =~ is the string comparison operator:

[dvw]

From the http://wecanrebuildhim.org/ website

[dickeja8]

The idea of obfuscated code makes sense to me. but how to get anything from it does not. Found this:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/B-Deobfuscate/lib/B/Deobfuscate.pod

It's something to turn obfuscated code into regular perl code, but I don't know how to begin trying to use it. Probably need to be able to create and/or compile perl.

I'm guessing there's a manual way to do it, but i haven't found anything on it.

Found this: http://vrm.wom.hu/scriptgen.cgi

Now if we could go the other way....

[blag]

Yeah, it looks like regular expressions are on the right track.

For those that don't know, a regular expression is a kind of formula which does something to a string of text. It might truncate the text, strip out certain characters, swap some words for others - the possibilities are endless.

My best guess is that we run the Steinbeck quote through a regular expression and use the result as the email subject.

However, I've been running that string of characters through all the online regex checkers I can find; each time it comes up with an error. I think that the "obfuscated" part means that we need to simplify/adjust the regex before we can run any text through it.

Sadly, I've now reached the limit of my coding knowledge - I think we need a Perl guru to help us out here...

[dickeja8]

I posted the problem to the guys at Perl Monks. If anyone can figure it out, it'll be them.

[Esteed]

Another update.

[degravedi]

Solved

[blag]

Awesome work - well done. Have emailed Conor with "node one secure" in the subject, waiting response.

[Esteed]

I emailed him with that subject, too. I admitted I wasn't the one that found the solve for the test, so if that's what my test was supposed to be, I failed, but I also tried to explain why I'm so well informed about these particular subjects. Hopefully they'll trust me.