Convert MD5 to base62 for URL

Question

I have a script to convert to base 62 (A-Za-z0-9) but how do I get a number out of MD5?

I have read in many places that because the number from an MD5 is bigger than

Answer 1

There actually is a Java implementation which you could probably extract. It's an open-source CMS solution called Pulse.

Look here for the code of toBase62() and fromBase62().

http://pulse.torweg.org/javadoc/src-html/org/torweg/pulse/util/StringUtils.java.html

The only dependency in StringUtils is the LifeCycle-class which provides a way to get a salted hash for a string which you might even omit all together or just copy the method over to your copy StringUtils. Voilá.