Hash function that produces short hashes?

Question

Is there a way of encryption that can take a string of any length and produce a sub-10-character hash? I want to produce reasonably unique ID\'s but based on message content

Answer 1

You can use the hashlib library for Python. The shake_128 and shake_256 algorithms provide variable length hashes. Here's some working code (Python3):

import hashlib
>>> my_string = 'hello shake'
>>> hashlib.shake_256(my_string.encode()).hexdigest(5)
'34177f6a0a'

Notice that with a length parameter x (5 in example) the function returns a hash value of length 2x.