Good choice for a lightweight checksum algorithm?

Question

I find myself needing to generate a checksum for a string of data, for consistency purposes. The broad idea is that the client can regenerate the checksum based on the payl

Answer 1

This is a rather old thread but I suspect it is still viewed quite often so - if all you need is a short but reliable piece of code to generate a checksum the Adler32 bit algorithm has to be your choice. Here is the JavaScript code

function adler32(data)
{
 var MOD_ADLER = 65521;
 var a = 1, b = 0;

 for (var i = 0;i < data.length;i++) 
 {
  a = (a + data.charCodeAt(i)) % MOD_ADLER;
  b = (b + a) % MOD_ADLER;
 }

 var adler = a | (b << 16);
 return adler;
}

The corresponding fiddle demonsrating the algorithm in action is here.