The Caesar cipher shifts each letter by a fixed number of places through the alphabet — history's most famous substitution cipher, supposedly used by Julius Caesar with a shift of 3.
Three modes:
- Encode — shift every letter forward by your chosen amount. With shift 3:
A→D, H→K, Z→C. Non-letters (spaces, digits, punctuation) are left alone.
- Decode — shift every letter back by the amount. The reverse of encode.
- Brute force — when you have ciphertext but don't know the shift, this tries all 25 possible shifts and shows each candidate, so you can read off the one that's real English. The classic way to break a Caesar cipher in seconds.
Good to know:
- The shift wraps around the alphabet (
Z + 1 → A).
- Preserve case (default on) keeps uppercase as uppercase and lowercase as lowercase. Turn it off to fold everything to one case — sometimes useful for analyzing ciphertext.
- A shift of 13 is the special case known as ROT13; this tool handles arbitrary shifts plus brute force, so it strictly does more than a ROT13-only tool.
- Caesar is trivially breakable and should never be used for real secrecy — it's a teaching tool and a puzzle.