NATO phonetic alphabet encode
NATO phonetic alphabet encode. Runs entirely on your device, nothing is uploaded.
Runs on your device. The file is never uploaded.
NATO phonetic alphabet encode replaces every letter and digit with its code word, Alpha through Zulu and Zero through Niner, joined by single spaces. A space in your text is marked with a slash. The ICAO spellings Juliett, X-ray and Niner are the ones used. Anything else has no code word and disappears from the output.
Questions
Which spelling alphabet does it use?
The NATO phonetic alphabet, with the ICAO spellings for the awkward ones: Juliett with two t characters, X-ray with a hyphen, and Niner for 9. Letters a to z map to Alpha through Zulu, and the digits 0 to 9 spell out as Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Niner. Words are joined by single spaces.
How are spaces between words shown?
As a forward slash, the same convention the Morse encoder here uses. A space in your text becomes a slash token in the output, sitting between the code words like any other token, so Nato decode can put your word breaks back. Anything else that is not a letter or a digit is dropped entirely rather than represented.
What happens to punctuation and other characters?
They disappear. Only the 26 letters and the ten digits have code words, and only the space has the slash convention, so full stops, commas, hyphens and any non-Latin character produce nothing at all and are silently removed from the output. Strip or replace punctuation first if you need it preserved in some form.
Does it keep my capitalisation?
No. The input is lower-cased before lookup, so an upper-case and a lower-case letter both give the same code word, and decoding returns lower case. The code words themselves are always written with an initial capital, because that is how the table stores them.
What is it for?
Reading a code out loud without being misheard. Serial numbers, licence keys, booking references and passwords over a phone line are the usual cases, since B and V or M and N are easy to confuse and Bravo and Victor are not. The output is plain text, so you can print it or paste it into a call script.