I have a set of ASCII strings, let’s say they are file paths. They could be both short and quite long.
I’m looking for an algorithm that could calculate hash of such a strings and this hash will be also a string, but will have a fixed length, like youtube video ids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo
^^^^^^^^^^^
MD5 seems to be what I need, but it is critical for me to have a short hash strings.
Is there a shell command or python library which can do that?
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Answer
I guess this question is off-topic, because opinion based, but at least one hint for you, I know the FNV hash because it is used by The Sims 3 to find resources based on their names between the different content packages. They use the 64 bits version, so I guess it is enough to avoid collisions in a relatively large set of reference strings. The hash is easy to implement, if no module satisfies you (pyfasthash has an implementation of it for example).
To get a short string out of it, I would suggest you use base64 encoding. For example, this is the size of a base64-encoded 64 bits hash: nsTYVQUag88= (and you can get rid or the padding =).
Edit: I had finally the same problem as you, so I implemented the above idea: https://gist.github.com/Cilyan/9424144