Question

I’m storing the user password on the db as a sha1 hash.

Unfortunately I’m getting strange answers.

I’m storing the string as this:

MessageDigest cript = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
              cript.reset();
              cript.update(userPass.getBytes("utf8"));
              this.password = new String(cript.digest());

I wanted something like this –>

aff –> “0c05aa56405c447e6678b7f3127febde5c3a9238”

rather than

aff –> �V@\D~fx����:�8

Answer 1

This is happening because cript.digest() returns a byte array, which you’re trying to print out as a character String. You want to convert it to a printable Hex String.

Easy solution: Use Apache’s commons-codec library:

String password = new String(Hex.encodeHex(cript.digest()),
                             CharSet.forName("UTF-8"));