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 = hashlib.md5(("the thing you want to hash").encode())

print(a.hexdigest())

you are giving nothing to hash here and since in python everything is in unicode you have to encode it to UTF-8(by default) first.