How detect a Git SHA ID in a text

Question

A Git SHA ID looks like this one 351e11dac558a764ba83f89c6598151d2dbaf904, it is a long hex number. But how should it be detected in a text? Search for "words" which only contain 0-9,a-f and have a length of at least 20 characters? But how to distinguish SHA IDs from normal words?

Answer 1

Yes, your approach will work. Remember, though, SHA1 is a general algorithm (not git specific), so it's possible your text could contain other SHA1 hashes in it which will also be 40 character hex strings.