{"id":7753,"date":"2022-01-01T18:27:34","date_gmt":"2022-01-01T13:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/?p=7753"},"modified":"2022-01-31T19:59:32","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T14:59:32","slug":"wordle-solved-reverse-engineering-and-hacking-wordle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/wordle-solved-reverse-engineering-and-hacking-wordle\/","title":{"rendered":"Wordle Solved: Reverse Engineering and Hacking Wordle"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s 1st January 2022 \u2014 while enjoying vacations from work, I kept hearing about this word puzzle called Wordle<\/a> \u2014 and figured I’d learn how it works. It’s gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months, created by Josh Wardle \u2014 a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner. This post has no spoilers.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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\"Wordle\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reverse Engineering Wordle#<\/a><\/h2>\n

While I did enjoy playing it for a day or two \u2014 soon after, I started to wonder if I could create a CLI to solve this game for me. You know I love creating CLIs, right<\/em>?<\/p>\n

If you’re new here, then you need to know that I’m a big fan of automation<\/strong>. I have created hundreds of free and open-source CLIs<\/a>, even a CLI to create CLIs<\/strong><\/a>, and a 10-hour long course with 22 projects<\/a> and 100 videos \u2014 where I teach<\/a> how to bend JavaScript to your will, separating yourself from 99% of humankind, and building any kind of automation software. It’s called NodeCLI.com<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking under the hood#<\/a><\/h2>\n

As any web developer could imagine \u2014 I started by inspecting the source code. I figured there must be some API endpoint with a database of words. Messing around with the Network tab, I found nothing.<\/p>\n

The AHA moment#<\/a><\/h3>\n

For a while, I was like, meh \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af looks like we’re going down the rabbit hole, ain’t we. But you know, before I do that, let’s check if there’s something stored in the localStorage. I found the entire game state with the solution<\/code> key inside there, to my surprise. \ud83e\udd73<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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\"Wordle<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The OMG.WTF?BBQ! moment#<\/a><\/h3>\n

No network requests. Game’s solution in localStorage.<\/p>\n

Something tells me there’s more to the story here. Let’s search for the word REBUS<\/code> (the wordle solution today 2022-01-01). Nops didn’t find anything.<\/p>\n

Let’s look for the JavaScript files. And there it was, a huge array of words defined as a variable La<\/code> that Wordle uses in combination with dates to give us so much more pain (fun?!) during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

var La = [\"cigar\", \"rebut\", \"\u2026 2,315 more words\"]<\/pre>\n<\/section>\n
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\"Wordle<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Figuring out the algorithm#<\/a><\/h3>\n
At this point, I knew I had discovered today’s solution and the entire list of words. All I needed to do was reverse engineer the minified JavaScript file to figure out how one of the words gets picked.<\/p>\n
Skimming through over 15,625 lines of code, I found a function called Da<\/code>.<\/p>\n
function Da(e) {\r\n\tvar a, s = Ga(e);\r\n\treturn (a = s % La.length), La[a];\r\n}<\/pre>\n
This function calls another function Ga<\/code> to find an index which is then used to find a single word from a gigantic list of words defined as La<\/code>.<\/p>\n
Funny enough, right after this function is the Ga<\/code> function:<\/p>\n
function Ga(e) {\r\n    return Na(Ha, e);\r\n}<\/pre>\n
OMG, yet another function call in here called Na<\/code> and another variable Ha<\/code>. Upon searching, I found the Ha<\/code> variable. This looks like a date in 2021. Maybe this is when the Wordle game was launched?! The day zero.<\/p>\n
var Ha = new Date(2021, 5, 19, 0, 0, 0, 0);<\/pre>\n
Oh, such fun, much luck \u2014 right below Ha<\/code> I found the Na<\/code> function:<\/p>\n
function Na(e, a) {\r\n    var s = new Date(e),\r\n        t = new Date(a).setHours(0, 0, 0, 0) - s.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);\r\n    return Math.round(t \/ 864e5);\r\n}<\/pre>\n
THIS. IS. IT.<\/strong> Evidently, this function finds the number of days between two dates and then rounds it off to an integer value for finding a word on that index from the La<\/code> words list.<\/p>\n
And finally, the mysterious input e<\/code> in all of these functions was today’s date. This bugger was a bit hard to find.<\/p>\n
(e.today = new Date());<\/pre>\n
And just like that, I was able to reverse engineer the following code, which picks up the words for yesterday, today, and tomorrow even.<\/p>\n
function convertDateToIndex(e, a) {\r\n\tlet s = new Date(e),\r\n\t\tt = new Date(a).setHours(0, 0, 0, 0) - s.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);\r\n\treturn Math.floor(t \/ 864e5);\r\n}\r\n\r\nlet baseDate = new Date(2021, 5, 19, 0, 0, 0, 0);\r\n\r\nfunction getIndex(todaysDate) {\r\n\treturn convertDateToIndex(baseDate, todaysDate);\r\n}\r\n\r\nfunction getSolution(today) {\r\n\tlet a,\r\n\t\ts = getIndex(today);\r\n\treturn (a = s % wordleWords.length), wordleWords[a];\r\n}\r\n\r\nlet today = new Date();\r\nlet yesterday = new Date().setDate(today.getDate() - 1);\r\nlet tomorrow = new Date().setDate(today.getDate() + 1);<\/pre>\n<\/section>\n
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\"Wordle#<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Wordle Solved JavaScript Bookmarklet#<\/a><\/h2>\n
Create and install this bookmarklet to help solve Wordle.<\/p>\n
Make a new bookmark in your browser (right-click on the bookmarks bar<\/a> and click Add Page...<\/code>)<\/p>\n