PHP md5 explained

Question

I am working on this PHP project and I have many places that an md5 is being used. I have even used it many times, but still today I am unclear on what the function is doing. I realize it decrypts the value passed in but what about undoing it to get it back to the original. Maybe i am not clear about the whole process and if anyone has information about the process I would highly appreciate it

Answer 1

md5 is a hashing function

It only works one way.

A hash function is any well-defined procedure or mathematical function that converts a large, possibly variable-sized amount of data into a small datum. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums, checksums or simply hashes.