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What Is Hashing

Hashing with examples

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Reddy Trainer
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7 views

What Is Hashing

Hashing with examples

Uploaded by

Reddy Trainer
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is Hashing?

Hashing refers to the process of generating a fixed-size output from an


input of variable size using the mathematical formulas known as hash
functions. This technique determines an index or location for the storage
of an item in a data structure.

Need for Hash data structure


The amount of data on the internet is growing exponentially every day,
making it difficult to store it all effectively. In day-to-day programming, this
amount of data might not be that big, but still, it needs to be stored,
accessed, and processed easily and efficiently. A very common data
structure that is used for such a purpose is the Array data structure.
Now the question arises if Array was already there, what was the need for
a new data structure! The answer to this is in the word “efficiency“.
Though storing in Array takes O(1) time, searching in it takes at
least O(log n) time. This time appears to be small, but for a large data set,
it can cause a lot of problems and this, in turn, makes the Array data
structure inefficient.
So now we are looking for a data structure that can store the data and
search in it in constant time, i.e. in O(1) time. This is how Hashing data
structure came into play. With the introduction of the Hash data structure,
it is now possible to easily store data in constant time and retrieve them in
constant time as well.

Components of Hashing
There are majorly three components of hashing:
1. Key: A Key can be anything string or integer which is fed as input in
the hash function the technique that determines an index or location for
storage of an item in a data structure.
2. Hash Function: The hash function receives the input key and returns
the index of an element in an array called a hash table. The index is
known as the hash index.
3. Hash Table: Hash table is a data structure that maps keys to values
using a special function called a hash function. Hash stores the data in
an associative manner in an array where each data value has its own
unique index.

import hashlib

def hash_string(input_string, algorithm='sha256'):

"""

Hash the input string using the specified algorithm.

Default algorithm is SHA-256.

"""

hash_object = hashlib.new(algorithm)

hash_object.update(input_string.encode('utf-8'))

return hash_object.hexdigest()

def main():

text = "Hello, World!"

algorithms = ['md5', 'sha1', 'sha256', 'sha512']

print(f"Original text: {text}")

for algo in algorithms:


hashed = hash_string(text, algo)

print(f"{algo.upper()} hash: {hashed}")

slightly_different_text = "Hello, World"

print(f"\nSlightly different text: {slightly_different_text}")

for algo in algorithms:

hashed = hash_string(slightly_different_text, algo)

print(f"{algo.upper()} hash: {hashed}")

if __name__ == "__main__":

main()

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