Computing an md5 hash of a data structure

Question

I want to compute an md5 hash not of a string, but of an entire data structure. I understand the mechanics of a way to do this (dispatch on the type of the value, canonical

Answer 1

bencode sorts dictionaries so:

import hashlib
import bencode
data = ['only', 'lists', [1,2,3], 
'dictionaries', {'a':0,'b':1}, 'numbers', 47, 'strings']
data_md5 = hashlib.md5(bencode.bencode(data)).hexdigest()
print data_md5

prints:

af1b88ca9fd8a3e828b40ed1b9a2cb20