If your partner is as geeky as you, he or she may enjoy a private message in hex encoding. Everyone else may at least enjoy the technology used here, concatenating a number of type conversions:
$text = "This is my secret message" -join ([Byte[]][Char[]]$text | ForEach-Object { '{0:x2}' -f $_ })
The text is converted to a character array, this is then converted into a byte array, and the bytes are finally converted to two-digit hex pairs which -join combines to something like this:
Which raises the question just how decode the message. Here's the trick:
-join $(foreach($hex in ('54686973206973206d7920736563726574206d657373616765' -split '(?<=\G[0-9a-f]{2})(?=.)')) { [Char][System.Convert]::ToByte($hex, 16) })
There are many use cases. For example, use the first code sample to encode some PowerShell command:
$text = 'Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.Status -eq "Running"}' -join ([Byte[]][Char[]]$text | ForEach-Object { '{0:X2}' -f $_ }) | clip
Next, paste the hex codes into your second script, and feed the result to Invoke-Expression:
Invoke-Expression (-join $(foreach($hex in ('4765742D53657276696365207C2057686572652D4F626A656374207B20245F2E537461747573202D6571202252756E6E696E67227D' -split '(?<=\G[0-9a-f]{2})(?=.)')) { [Char][System.Convert]::ToByte($hex, 16) }))
Now ask your colleagues what this would do! As it turns out, it simply runs the encoded command. In this case, it lists all running services.
