Do the SHA1 of a string always return ASCII characters?

Question

The input string can be a unicode string.Do the output string after calculating SHA1 will always return ASCII characters?

Answer 1

It depends but strictly speaking, no. The output of the SHA-1 hash is 160 bits, or 20 bytes, but the bytes are not guaranteed to be in the ASCII range.

However, some hash functions output the hex equivalent (i.e. 40 characters) of the 20 bytes, so if the first three bytes of the actual hash are 0x7e, 0x03, and 0xb2, the output would begin with "7e03b2", in which case the output is ASCII.