hash() algorithm

[Christopher T King]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, [iso-8859-1] Benoît Dejean wrote:

> i need to use a ~checksum function, like md5, but i was also thinking
> about hash() which is obviously simpler.

md5 is actually very easy to use on Python:

>>> import md5
>>> chksum=md5.new('apple')
>>> chksum.hexdigest()
'1f3870be274f6c49b3e31a0c6728957f'
>>> int(chksum.hexdigest())
41499123188802761002464065009245263231L

This is a little more verbose than hash(), but it's just as
straightforward, and can more easily be used with large messages (see the 
.update() method of the md5 object returned by new()).