my @textCharacters = split( // , $plainText );

   for( $j = 0 ; $j <= ( length( $plainText  )/8 )-1 ; $j++ )
   {
       $z = "";

       for( $k = 0 ; $k <= 7; $k++ )
       {
         $i = $j*8 + $k;

         $z .= $textCharacters[$i];
       }

       print "STRING";
       print "Z = X $z X \n";

       my $cipher = new Crypt::Blowfish $key;
       $cryptText .= $cipher->encrypt( $z );
   }
[download]

This works fine save for the fact that get out many many "funky characters" such as :

7Æ Mb¢[ñF%L;Á^ô¥  X
[download]

These are making my telnet connection act odd as well as preventing the next step of the project which is remapping the chracterset of the Blowfish output into a simpler ( CGI Safe string ). I have that working for the ascii characters but not for the output characters that Blowfish puts out. I designed the remapping system to take the 256 chracters of the standard ASCII set:

 my @glyphs;
   my $plainText = $_[0];

   # Pad string to divisible by glyph choice
   my $padLength;

   if( length( $plainText ) % 3 ne "0" )
   {
      $padLength = 3 - ( length( $plainText ) % 3 );
   }
   $plainText .= " "x$padLength;
   print " pad = $padLength , $plainText X\n";


   # Convert text to ASCII
   @asciiCodes = unpack( "c*", $plainText );

   for( $j = 0 ; $j <= ( length( $plainText  )/3 )-1 ; $j++ )
   {
       my $sum = 0;

       for( $k = 0 ; $k <= 2 ; $k++ )
       {

         $i = ( $j*3 + $k );

         $sum += @asciiCodes[$i] * ( 65536 ** ( 2-$k ) );

       }

       push( @glyphs , $sum );

   }



   return( @glyphs );
[download]

and that will output a string of numbers that represent 4 characters. It does more after that but this is the start. The blowfish output characters causes this to return negative values. I though mabye that it is working on 16 bit characters like unicode does and I upped the alphabet size to 2^16 but I still get negative values.

Any ideas?