What c# equivalent encoding does Python's hash.digest() use ?

Question

I am trying to port a python program to c#. Here is the line that's supposed to be a walkthrough but is currently tormenting me:

hash = hashlib.md5(inputstring).digest()

After generating a similar MD5 hash in c# It is absolutely vital that I create a similar hash string as the original python program or my whole application will fail.

My confusion lies in which encoding to use when converting to string in c# i.e

?Encoding enc = new ?Encoding();
string Hash =enc.GetString(HashBytes); //HashBytes is my generated hash

Because I am unable to create two similar hashes when using Encoding.Default i.e

string Hash = Encoding.Default.GetString(HashBytes);

So I'm thinking knowing the deafult hash.digest() encoding for python would help

EDIT

Ok maybe some more code will articulate my problem more. After the hash is calculated in the python program some calculations are carried out i.e

hash = hashlib.md5(inputstring).digest()

for i in range(0,6):

value += ord(hash[i])

return value

Now can you see why two different Hash strings will be problematic? Some of the characters that appear when the python program is ran are repalced by a '?' in C#.

Answer 1

It is not encoded at all, it is just an array of bytes in both languages.

Answer 2

I presume you're using an earlier version of Python than 3, and your string is a normal str.

If you're talking about the output, the digest method returns a string consisting on raw bytes . The equivalent type in C# is byte[], which you already seem to have. It's not text, so using the Encoding class makes no sense.

If you're talking about the input, the md5 function takes in a normal str, which is a string of bytes. You'll have to look at the code before that to figure out what encoding the data is in.

Edit:

Regarding the code you posted, all it's doing is it's taking the values of the six first bytes in the hash and adding them together. You should be able to figure out how to do that in C#.

And make sure you learn the difference between a string of bytes and a string of characters.

Answer 3

According to the documentation, Python strings are ASCII by default. Alternate encodings must be explicitly specified. Therefore, you should be able to pass an ASCII string to the C# MD5 library and get the same hash bytes as if you passed the string to the Python MD5 library.