At times, you may want to very simply encrypt a small piece of text to store in the registry, a database, or file, but you don’t want the overhead or complexity of a government-standard encryption technique.
A much simpler encryption method is required, and the following function provides just that. It’s called Crypt: Pass it your plain text and it’ll encrypt it; pass it your encrypted text and it’ll decrypt it. It’s simple and all in fewer than fifteen lines of code:
Public Function SimpleCrypt( _ ByVal Text As String) As String ' Encrypts/decrypts the passed string using ' a simple ASCII value-swapping algorithm Dim strTempChar As String, i As Integer For i = 1 To Len(Text) If Asc(Mid$(Text, i, 1)) < 128 Then strTempChar = _ CType(Asc(Mid$(Text, i, 1)) + 128, String) ElseIf Asc(Mid$(Text, i, 1)) > 128 Then strTempChar = _ CType(Asc(Mid$(Text, i, 1)) - 128, String) End If Mid$(Text, i, 1) = _ Chr(CType(strTempChar, Integer)) Next i Return Text End Function
It’s not recommended for highly confidential information (as anyone with this script could also decrypt your data), but it’s nonetheless highly useful. Here’s how you might use this function:
Dim MyText As String ' Encrypt MyText = "Karl Moore" MyText = Crypt(MyText) MessageBox.Show(MyText) ' Decrypt MyText = Crypt(MyText) MessageBox.Show(MyText)
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