in reply to can this text be recovered???

Let me start by spelling out the steps this text went through.

  1. Every non-word character (characters other than letters, digits, and the underscore) was replaced with a newline. That will be hard to reverse because those characters are, for all intents and purposes, deleted.
  2. The resulting lines were sorted. Again, this is hard to reverse because you can't recover the original order.
  3. Duplicate lines in the sorted output were discarded. Again, you can't tell how many copies of a particular line there were.
  4. The text was reformatted (word wrapped). You can't reverse this either.
  5. It was rot13 encoded. This is easily reversed.

I think it's pretty clear that the original text can not be recovered.

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Re^2: can this text be recovered???
by ambrus (Abbot) on Mar 19, 2007 at 20:52 UTC
    1. The text was reformatted (word wrapped). You can't reverse this either.

    That step can be reversed I think, because you know from what was done before that every word stood on one line.

    Not that it would help for the original problem.