RotURL: Rot13 for URLs

RotURL is a simple substitution cipher for encoding/obscuring URLs embedded in other URLs (e.g. in a querystring). Also, common chars that need to be escaped (:/?=&%#) are mapped to infrequently used capital letters, so this generally yields shorter querystrings, too.

/**
 * Rot35 with URL/urlencode-friendly mappings. To avoid increasing size during
 * urlencode(), commonly encoded chars are mapped to more rarely used chars.
 */
function rotUrl($url) {
    return strtr($url,
        './-:?=&%# ZQXJKVWPY abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789ABCDEFGHILMNORSTU',
        'ZQXJKVWPY ./-:?=&%# 123456789ABCDEFGHILMNORSTUabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');
}

rotUrl('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=Base64#foo')
    == '8MMGLJQQ5EZR9B9G5491ZFI7QRQ9E45SZG8GKM9MC5VxG5391CPcjx51I38WL51I38Vk1L5fdY6FF';
rotUrl(rotUrl($anyUrl)) = $anyUrl;

You could save a few more bytes by encoding the schema (e.g. “h” for http://, “H” for https://). Since your end encoding has to be URL-safe, there’s not much you can do beyond this to compress a URL embedded in a URL.

3 thoughts on “RotURL: Rot13 for URLs

  1. Eric says:

    If you use this function, I learned (the hard way) that when decoding it you should switch the parameters for strstr, meaning it should look like this:
    return strtr($url,
    ‘ZQXJKVWPY ./-:?=&%# 123456789ABCDEFGHILMNORSTUabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’,
    ‘./-:?=&%# ZQXJKVWPY abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789ABCDEFGHILMNORSTU’
    );

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