So im just playing around with PHP and the MD5 functionality, sorry if this sounds really silly, but I cant seem to understand, how is it possible to represent an unlimited number of characters of input into a 32 bit character output? Is my logic sound here? Or is there a limit to the input that a MD5 function can take?
Thanks…
I think you may be confusing an MD5 ‘hash’ with compression or encryption.
A hash code is just a product of a process that goes through data and generates data that is likely to be unique for the given input. MD5 hashes don’t contain all the data, just a probably unique representation of a ‘thumbprint’ of the data.