In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Andrew Robert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Good evening, > > I need to generate checksums of a file, store the value in a variable, > and pass it along for later comparison. > > The MD5 module would seem to do the trick but I'm sketchy on implementation. > > > The nearest I can see would be > > import md5 > > m=md5.new() > contents = open(self.file_name,"rb").read() > check=md5.update(contents) > > However this does not appear to be actually returning the checksum. > > Does anyone have insight into where I am going wrong? After calling update(), you need to call digest(). Update() only updates the internal state of the md5 state machine; digest() returns the hash. Also, for the code above, it's m.update(), not md5.update(). Update() is a method of an md5 instance object, not the md5 module itself. Lastly, the md5 algorithm is known to be weak. If you're doing md5 to maintain compatability with some pre-existing implementation, that's one thing. But, if you're starting something new from scratch, I would suggest using SHA-1 instead (see the sha module). SHA-1 is much stronger cryptographically than md5. The Python API is virtually identical, so it's no added work to switch to the stronger algorithm. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
