How to get MD5 sum of a string using python?

You can do the following:

Python 2.x

import hashlib
print hashlib.md5("whatever your string is").hexdigest()

Python 3.x

import hashlib
print(hashlib.md5("whatever your string is".encode('utf-8')).hexdigest())

However in this case you're probably better off using this helpful Python module for interacting with the Flickr API:

  • http://stuvel.eu/flickrapi

... which will deal with the authentication for you.

Official documentation of hashlib


For Python 2.x, use python's hashlib

import hashlib
m = hashlib.md5()
m.update("000005fab4534d05api_key9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4e5d52permswrite")
print m.hexdigest()

Output: a02506b31c1cd46c2e0b6380fb94eb3d


You can use b character in front of a string literal:

import hashlib
print(hashlib.md5(b"Hello MD5").hexdigest())
print(hashlib.md5("Hello MD5".encode('utf-8')).hexdigest())

Out:

e5dadf6524624f79c3127e247f04b548
e5dadf6524624f79c3127e247f04b548

Have you tried using the MD5 implementation in hashlib? Note that hashing algorithms typically act on binary data rather than text data, so you may want to be careful about which character encoding is used to convert from text to binary data before hashing.

The result of a hash is also binary data - it looks like Flickr's example has then been converted into text using hex encoding. Use the hexdigest function in hashlib to get this.


Use hashlib.md5 in Python 3.

import hashlib

source = '000005fab4534d05api_key9a0554259914a86fb9e7eb014e4e5d52permswrite'.encode()
md5 = hashlib.md5(source).hexdigest() # returns a str
print(md5) # a02506b31c1cd46c2e0b6380fb94eb3d

If you need byte type output, use digest() instead of hexdigest().