how to create md5 hash of a column in R?

Question

I have a data frame

ID, VID  1 , xyz-0001 

I would like to replace VID with md5 hash of VID column value.

How would i do that in R? I looked at digest package but can not figure out how to put that in R Code

Thanks

Answer 1

Package digest absolutely suitable for this task, so firstly we load it:

library(digest) 

Then create/load/etc. test data.frame df:

txt <- "ID,VID 1,xyz-0001 2,abc-0987"  df <- read.table(header=T, text=txt, sep=",", stringsAsFactors=F) df 

The initial data looks like:

  ID      VID 1  1 xyz-0001 2  2 abc-0987 

Then we can use function digest with specified algorithm:

df$VID <- sapply(df$VID, digest, algo="md5") df 

Now we have hashed column VID in df:

  ID                              VID 1  1 44e3a9cf85f802ef50f18e64e01c5e32 2  2 c576ff180b2046c1a3ae939766588fd3 

Answer 2

With an addition to redmode's answer:

library(digest) txt <- "hello world" hash <- digest(txt, algo="md5", serialize=F) hash 

[1] "5eb63bbbe01eeed093cb22bb8f5acdc3"

Setting serialize option to FALSE makes your results consistent with what you would get from online hash generators such as this or this.