No. What you described will work for a simple substitution cypher, but not for a one time pad. A one time pad is the same length as the message, and permutates every letter independently. Trying all keys will yield <i>every possible plaintext</i>. For example the phrase:<p>&quot;The swallow flies at midnight&quot;<p>May (with a one time pad) be encrypted into<p>&quot;WD4oXOl8yO0QtD4sOf7ip0P7ScIia&quot;<p>(which, incidentally, is indistinguishable from random noise)<p>If you just bruteforced that by xor&#x27;ing every character with every other possible character you could derive every possible message of that length, such as:<p>&quot;garfield hate lasagna someday&quot;<p>&quot;men are cats why even bother?&quot;<p>&quot;pocket knives go to space yay&quot;<p>etc ad infinitum<p>No measure of semantic analysis will help you here!