Science & Data

Hashing

Compute a cryptographic hash or checksum of some text. Pass a quoted string; the result is a lowercase hexadecimal digest. Function names are case-insensitive.

sha256("hello")
md5("hello")
crc32("hello world")

Hashes are deterministic — the same input always gives the same digest — so (unlike random and uuid) they take no seed and never change between runs.

Functions

Function	Digest	Example
`md5(text)`	MD5 (128-bit)	`md5("hello")`
`sha1(text)`	SHA-1 (160-bit)	`sha1("hello")`
`sha256(text)`	SHA-256 (256-bit)	`sha256("hello")`
`sha384(text)`	SHA-384 (384-bit)	`sha384("hello")`
`sha512(text)`	SHA-512 (512-bit)	`sha512("hello")`
`sha3(text)`	SHA3-256 (alias `sha3_256`)	`sha3("hello")`
`ripemd160(text)`	RIPEMD-160 (160-bit)	`ripemd160("hello")`
`crc32(text)`	CRC32 checksum (8 hex chars)	`crc32("hello")`

Strings use straight quotes, single or double — the quotes are not part of the hashed text:

sha256('hello')
sha256("hello world")

A number is hashed as its written form, so md5(42) hashes the text "42":

md5(42)

Common mistakes

Quote the input. sha256(hello) treats hello as an unknown word and errors — write sha256("hello").
MD5 and SHA-1 are fine as checksums but are not collision-resistant; prefer SHA-256 or stronger for anything security-sensitive.
A digest is text, so it can't be fed into further arithmetic in the same expression.