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Your programmer friend, Daniel, went on a two week long vacation, and asked you to look after his adorable dog. He loves dogs, and he certainly doesn’t want a stranger to do this job, so you agree.

Your task is simple: you have to go over to his house every day for two weeks, give food and water to the dog and if you have time, play with him for a while. But on the first day you suddenly realize: you don’t even know the puppy’s name!

How can you be a good company to him, if you can’t even call him by his name? You try to reach Daniel, but his phone is off, so you send him a text explaining your situation. Soon, you get your answer:

oh, Bang, i Forgot! or did i? now i should give yoU some secret code, rot13 or a „the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” type of hidden code… Maybe even an ^ anagram would be enough for you, aS i think you are not a CertiFied code cracker. bUt i don’t want to underestimAte you either… i think i won’t give you ` anY hidden messages, just text You in an hour with his Kind naMe… or will i?

daniel

First, you find this message very strange, but soon you suddenly realize what the dog’s name is.

Of course, it’s true that you are not an experienced puzzler – someone in the Puzzling Stack Exchange would be even able to say the dog’s breed!

What is the dog's name and breed?

Clarification:

The question can be answered by only reading the text message (highlighted part). The other parts do not contain any useful information, however the title can be a hint for the most important part of the puzzle.

Hint 1:

Every part of the title is a hint (but I'm sure that everyone realized that it is a puzzle, and dogs are involved, so focus on the third noun).

Hint 2:

Daniel must have been very keen on choosing the first 100-ish characters, but after that he just wrote what came into his mind.

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  • $\begingroup$ had a hunch that rot13 (pncvgnyvmrq yrggref, ncbfgebcur, pnerg, ryyvcfvf, tenir/onpx-gvpx xrl) are linked to this puzzle ... $\endgroup$
    – Kryesec
    Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 1:55
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, the first part is about rot13(vqragvslvat yrggref gung ner bss). Then Hint1 helps on the next steps, but I will add more hints soon :) $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 6:08
  • $\begingroup$ as your friend is a programmer could rot13(fbzr punenpgref eryngrq gb ertrk) ? $\endgroup$
    – Flying_whale
    Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 9:27
  • $\begingroup$ No, he is not thinking about that, but you are on the right track with examining these basic techniques and coding types a programmer can use :) $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 10:42

3 Answers 3

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Solution:

HIS NAME IS TYRRON.
I converted the capital letters and the caret + apostrophe to ASCII than you count from the start in the message to get each caracter (you dont count spaces, and all of them will be in the "thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog" phrase) you can search each letter to find the solution. For example you get 066 for the B caracter and the 66th caracter in the message is H

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  • $\begingroup$ Precisely, this is how your friend wanted you to read his text and get the dog's name! Now you only miss the breed, but I think it will be the easier part, now that you have the name. $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 21, 2019 at 16:22
  • $\begingroup$ I accepted this as the correct answer, because it contains the main part of the puzzle, but the breed was found by @arbitrahj, so please upvote his answer too! $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 7:01
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Poko did the heavy lifting, so starting with

TYRRON

and

The clue mentions rot13 and anagrams

You get

rot13(TYRRON) = GLEEBA

And then you can

Anagram(GLEEBA) = BEAGLE

But I suggest all credit go to pokolrajutsz

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  • $\begingroup$ And yes, the breed is correct too :) Thank you for showing support for @Pokolrajutsz, I also think that it was the harder part of the puzzle, so I will accept his answer and cplete it with yours. But everyone, please uppvote this one too! $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 6:59
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Hands down to @Pokolrajutsz for the incredible approach to his solution, and arbitrahj for finding the missing key. Since this is a programming puzzle, I wanted to share how you can solve the first part using Python. This was really a fun puzzle to learn from!

import re

# Read the letter
text = """oh, Bang, i Forgot! or did i? now i should give yoU some secret code, rot13 or a „the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” type of hidden code… Maybe even an ^ anagram would be enough for you, aS i think you are not a CertiFied code cracker. bUt i don’t want to underestimAte you either… i think i won’t give you ` anY hidden messages, just text You in an hour with his Kind naMe… or will i?

daniel"""

# Capture all capital letters
capital_val = re.findall(r'[A-Z\^\`]',text)

# For each capital letter found, find it's position/decimal value
decimal_val = [ord(letter) for letter in capital_val]

# Capture all values excluding spaces
lowercs_val = re.findall(r'[^ ]',text)

# Print the message based on decimal val
output = ""
for position in decimal_val:
    output += lowercs_val[position-1]

# Print the result
print(output)
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  • $\begingroup$ Woah, thank you for taking the extra mile and making this neat code! :) $\endgroup$
    – Annosz
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 6:57

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