hashlib.md5() TypeError: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing

Question

I am new to coding and have ran into a problem trying to encode a string.

>>> import hashlib
>>> a = hashlib.md5()
>>> a.update(\'         


        

Answer 1

A solution that works in both py2/py3:

from six import ensure_binary
from hashlib import md5

md5(ensure_binary('hi')).digest()