# Random letters? Nope

Yes, this actually happened.

About half a month ago I emailed this string of characters to Beastly Gerbil.

]Ñ\wQÝEwp

bin mse txt


I did this only because my earlier puzzle I emailed him, uh... didn't work.

The gerbil, it seems, never got around to solving it. But maybe you will.

What does this string mean?

Big hint:

binary, morse, text

• Have you seen Code Puzzles: What Not To Do? This doesn't really have much to go off of, so it seems to me that the only way to solve it would be "try random things until English comes out". – Deusovi May 15 at 5:01
• And that’s ^ also a big reason I never could solve it. Cipher guesswork isn’t fun and usually takes a very long time for short strings – Beastly Gerbil May 15 at 13:14
• @BeastlyGerbil - I added a hint – merrybot May 15 at 20:01
• @Deusovi - I added a hint – merrybot May 15 at 20:01
• @TCooper - treat a 0 as no signal and a 1 as signal. Follow Morse code spacing rules as well. :) – merrybot May 15 at 21:22

PUZZ2

How I got that:

Convert the original text string from ASCII to binary.
That produces this string:
010111011101000101011100011101110101000111011101010001010111011101110000

Now, treat single 1's as dots, runs of three 1's as dashes and runs of three 0's as separators.

That produces:
.--. | ..- | --.. | --.. | ..---

which encodes PUZZ2

• Correct! Nice work :) – merrybot May 15 at 22:30
• But what does it mean??? – Anon May 15 at 22:38
• @Anon - rot13/ chmmyr ahzore gjb ?? – Lanny Strack May 15 at 22:43
• @LannyStrack Haha I am dense – Anon May 15 at 22:47