What pool of characters do MD5 and SHA have?

Question

Does MD5 and SHA only contain alphanumeric characters? (i.e., from A to Z and 0 to 9, or do they exclude some characters?)

wroniasty · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-04T11:15:53.420

68

MD5 and SHA hashes in raw form are binary, however their common representation is a hex-encoded string, which contains characters [a-fA-F0-9].

So if this is what you meant, then characters G-Z, g-z are "excluded".

Another, less common, representation is Base64 encoding [0-9a-zA-Z+/].

edited May 04 '15 at 11:15

answered Sep 27 '12 at 09:36

wroniasty

Yeah the hex form is what I what mean. Thanks. – IMB Sep 27 '12 at 09:42
7

It's common, but not single. Unix password files, for example, contains hashes in Base64 format [0-9a-zA-Z+/]. – Pavel Ognev Sep 28 '12 at 05:38
1

Shouldn't an equal sign (`=`) also end up there? In base64? – deostroll Mar 25 '22 at 23:11

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