Mind Mining Medium

Javascript: Octal to ASCII

Gareth Heyes posted a fun little challenge and I couldn’t help but attack it. It took me longer than I thought. Not to be a spoiler, but at some point you have to convert octals to ASCII values. Now, I have done decimal to ASCII, binary to ASCII, and even hex to ASCII, but never octal to ASCII. Searching around, I found everyone seemed to use PHP, ASP, or some sort of “higher” level programming.

I found some really old code on some google cache, which I lost the url to, and it seemed to work. By working, I mean, the idea was right, the code wasn’t. After fooling around with it for a bit, I got something like the following.

String.prototype.octToAscii = function()
{
  var temp = '', result = '', input = this + '%';
  for(i = 0; i = 0; j++, k--)
      {
        if( (temp.match("\\n")) && (notMatchedYet) )
        {
          k--;
          notMatchedYet = false;
        }
        partial = temp.charAt(j) * Math.pow(8, k);
        running += partial;
      }
      result += String.fromCharCode(running);
      temp = '';
    }
  }
  return result.replace(/%40%/g, "%40%")
};