Re: ASCII art from sourcecode as image

Arthur J. O'Dwyer wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Harry Mason wrote:
>>
>> Erik Itter wrote:
>> > I have seen both linux source codes and some scripts for my company
>> > rendered as images - reads formated with extra blanks line feeds etc. to
>> > look like some image if displayed using small enough letters. (without
>> > inserting/deleting anything changing the source from the compilers point
>> > of view)
>>
>> For perl there is Acme::EyeDrops. It doesn't just format the program, it
>> obfuscates it too.
> 
>> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
>> eval eval '"'.                          ('#').
>>                                        '!'.'/' .('['
><snip most of very nice program>
> 
> The OP has told me via e-mail that he really wants Java, of course.
> So unfortunately the 'eval big_long_string' trick that I think is
> at the root of EyeDrops' approach wouldn't work.

Bear in mind that this is actually an obfuscator, not just a reformatter.
You could achieve a similar effect in most languages, including Java, by
creative use of white space, string concatenation, etc.

> Out of curiosity: Why *two* nested 'eval's at the start of this program?

The inner "eval" constructs the text of the original program. You can see this
if you replace the outer "eval" with "print":

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
print "hello, world\n";

which is the original source code. 

> And what does ('['^'.') mean?  0x5B^0x2E = 0x75 = 'u', or is there some
> deeper magic at work here? :)

('['^'.') corresponds to the "u" in "use strict". Obfuscating is so much more
effective if you don't use any alphanumerics in your source code. :)

-- 
|  Harry Mason  | .------------. |    .___,    |"Whatever you do will be |
| University of | |  hjm200 @  | | ___('v')___ | insignificant. However, |
|  Southampton  | | zepler.net | | `"-\._./-"' | it is vitally important |
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