humanhash3

humanhash

humanhash provides human-readable representations of digests.

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Example

.. code-block:: python

>>> import humanhash

>>> digest = '7528880a986c40e78c38115e640da2a1'
>>> humanhash.humanize(digest)
'three-georgia-xray-jig'
>>> humanhash.humanize(digest, words=6)
'high-mango-white-oregon-purple-charlie'

>>> humanhash.uuid()
('potato-oranges-william-friend', '9d2278759ae24698b1345525bd53358b')

Caveats

Don’t store the humanhash output, as its statistical uniqueness is only around 1 in 4.3 billion. Its intended use is as a human-readable (and, most importantly, memorable) representation of a longer digest, unique enough for display in a user interface, where a user may need to remember or verbally communicate the identity of a hash, without having to remember a 40-character hexadecimal sequence. Nevertheless, you should keep original digests around, then pass them through humanize() only as you’re displaying them.

How It Works

The procedure for generating a humanhash involves compressing the input to a fixed length (default: 4 bytes), then mapping each of these bytes to a word in a pre-defined wordlist (a default wordlist is supplied with the library). This algorithm is consistent, so the same input, given the same wordlist, will always give the same output. You can also use your own wordlist, and specify a different number of words for output.

Inspiration

• Chroma-Hash_ - A human-viewable representation of a hash (albeit not one that can be output on a terminal, or shouted down a hallway).
• The NATO Phonetic Alphabet_ - A great example of the trade-off between clarity of human communication and byte-wise efficiency of representation.

.. _Chroma-Hash: http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash/ .. _The NATO Phonetic Alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet