Shortest hash in python to name cache files

Question

What is the shortest hash (in filename-usable form, like a hexdigest) available in python? My application wants to save cache files for some objects. The objects mu

Answer 1

We use hashlib.sha1.hexdigest(), which produces even longer strings, for cache objects with good success. Nobody is actually looking at cache files anyway.

Answer 2

The builtin hash function of strings is fairly collision free, and also fairly short. It has 2**32 values, so it is fairly unlikely that you encounter collisions (if you use its abs value, it will have only 2**31 values).

You have been asking for the shortest hash function. That would certainly be

def hash(s):
  return 0

but I guess you didn't really mean it that way...