Caesar Cipher Implementation

Description

The Caesar Cipher is a type of substitution cipher where each letter in the plaintext is shifted by a certain number of positions down or up the alphabet. It is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques.

Problem Definition

• Input: A string text and an integer shift representing the number of positions each letter should be shifted.
• Output: Return the encrypted string by shifting each letter in the input string by the given shift value. Non-alphabetic characters should remain unchanged.

Example

• Input:

  • text = "HELLO"
  • shift = 3

• Output:

  • "KHOOR"

• Input:

  • text = "caesar cipher"
  • shift = 2

• Output:

  • "ecguct ekrjgt"

Algorithm Overview

1. Traverse each character in the input string.
2. If the character is a letter, shift it by the given shift value.
   • For lowercase letters, ensure it wraps around 'z' to 'a'.
   • For uppercase letters, ensure it wraps around 'Z' to 'A'.
3. If the character is non-alphabetic (e.g., spaces, punctuation), leave it unchanged.
4. Return the encrypted string.

Time Complexity

• Best Case: O(n)
• Average Case: O(n)
• Worst Case: O(n) where n is the length of the input string. Each character in the string is processed exactly once.

Space Complexity

• O(n) where n is the length of the string, since a new string is created to store the encrypted result.

Explanation

The Caesar Cipher shifts each character individually, meaning the time required is proportional to the number of characters in the string O(n). The space complexity is also O(n) because the algorithm constructs a new string to store the encrypted text. If modifying a mutable string array in place, the space complexity would be O(1).

C++ Implementation

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

string caesarCipher(string text, int shift) {
    string result = "";

    // Traverse each character in the input string
    for (int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++) {
        char c = text[i];

        // Encrypt uppercase letters
        if (isupper(c)) {
            result += char(int(c + shift - 'A') % 26 + 'A');
        }
        // Encrypt lowercase letters
        else if (islower(c)) {
            result += char(int(c + shift - 'a') % 26 + 'a');
        }
        // Leave non-alphabetic characters unchanged
        else {
            result += c;
        }
    }
    return result;
}

int main() {
    string text = "HELLO";
    int shift = 3;

    cout << "Original text: " << text << endl;
    cout << "Encrypted text: " << caesarCipher(text, shift) << endl;

    return 0;
}