Question

I would like to be able to take an arbitrary string, run it through a hashing function (like MD5), and then interpret the resulting digest in base-36.

I know there already exists a Digest library in Ruby, but as far as I can tell I can’t get at the raw bytes of a digest; the to_s function is mapped to hexdigest, which is, of course, base-16.

Answer 1

Fixnum#to_s accepts a base as the argument. So does string#to_i. Because of this, you can convert from the base-16 string to an int, then to base 36 string:

i = hexstring.to_i(16)
base_36 = i.to_s(36)