Generating an MD5 hash

The MD5 hash is one of the most commonly used hashes within web applications due to their ease of use and the speed at which they are hashed. The MD5 hash was invented in 1991 to replace the previous version, MD4, and it is still used to this day.

Getting ready

For this script, we will only need the hashlib module.

How to do it…

Generating an MD5 hash within Python is extremely simple, due to the nature of the module we can import. We need to define the module to import and then decide which string we want to hash. We should hard code this into the script, but this means the script would have to be modified each time a new string has to be hashed.

Instead, we use the raw_input feature in Python to ask the user for a string:

import hashlib
message = raw_input("Enter the string you would like to hash: ")
md5 = hashlib.md5(message.encode())
print (md5.hexdigest())

How it works…

The hashlib module does the bulk of the work for us behind the scenes. Hashlib is a giant library that...