Question

I need to encrypt a string (from a text area) that will also be decrypted later on when it is displayed.

I’m not to concerned about it being majorly secure, but just don’t want to store the data in plain text format.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this easily in Rails?

Answer 1

If you’re not concerned about security you can just base64-encode your string:

encoded = Base64::encode(string)
decoded = Base64::decode(encoded)

By the way it’s also suitable for encoding binary data.

This isn’t really encrypting as any developer may even guess that its Base64 encoded data.