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Hash Generator — MD5, SHA

How do I generate an MD5/SHA hash?

Result

5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592
aaf4c61ddcc5e8a2dabede0f3b482cd9aea9434d
2cf24dba5fb0a30e26e83b2ac5b9e29e1b161e5c1fa7425e73043362938b9824

How it is calculated

A hash function turns text of any length into a fixed-length fingerprint. The tool computes three of them from exactly the characters you type: MD5 (128 bits, shown as 32 hex characters), SHA-1 (160 bits, 40 hex characters) and SHA-256 (256 bits, 64 hex characters). The same input always gives the same output, and even a one-character change produces a completely different hash. Hashing is one-way: you cannot recover the text from the hash, only guess candidates and compare. Spaces, line breaks and capital letters are part of the input, and the text is hashed as UTF-8. MD5 and SHA-1 are broken for security use such as signatures; they remain handy as checksums. An empty box returns nothing.

Worked example

Enter the word hello in lower case, with no spaces. The MD5 hash is 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592. The SHA-1 hash is aaf4c61ddcc5e8a2dabede0f3b482cd9aea9434d, and the SHA-256 hash is 2cf24dba5fb0a30e26e83b2ac5b9e29e1b161e5c1fa7425e73043362938b9824. If you instead enter Hello with a capital H, all three values change completely, which is why you can compare a downloaded file's checksum with the published one to spot even a tiny change.

Try this example →

Common mistakes

  • Adding an invisible trailing space or line break when pasting, which produces a different hash from the one you expected.
  • Comparing hashes in a different letter case; the digits are the same, but a tool may expect lower-case hex.
  • Using MD5 or SHA-1 to store passwords; they are fast to brute-force, and passwords need a slow salted function such as bcrypt or Argon2.
  • Treating a hash as encryption; it cannot be reversed, so there is nothing to decrypt.
  • Hashing the text of a file when the published checksum is of the file's bytes; line endings and encoding can differ.

About this calculator

This tool runs a piece of text or data through a cryptographic hash function such as MD5 or one of the SHA family, producing a fixed-length string of characters called a hash or digest. The same input always produces the same hash, but the process only works one way: you cannot reverse a hash back into the original text, and even a tiny change to the input produces a completely different result.

Developers use it to verify that a downloaded file hasn't been corrupted or tampered with by comparing hashes, to generate checksums for data integrity checks, and to create consistent identifiers or lookup keys from arbitrary text during testing and debugging. It also comes up when learning how password storage or digital signatures work conceptually.

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