/humanhash

Human-readable digests.

Primary LanguagePythonThe UnlicenseUnlicense

aussiehash

aussiehash provides human-readable representations of digests. Based on the humanhash codebase at https://github.com/blag/humanhash, the dictionary has been updated to provide an Australian localisation. The word list has been filtered to be SFW, use at your own discretion though!

Example

>>> import humanhash

>>> digest = '7528880a986c40e78c38115e640da2a1'
>>> humanhash.humanize(digest)
'sunnies-drink-woop-garbo'
>>> humanhash.humanize(digest, words=6)
'station-yabby-piker-pav-cockie-apples'

>>> humanhash.uuid()
('furphy-back-daks-wombat', '8cdfd5e0ba2b48de89c8989f62a985b4')

Install

This module is NOT YET available on PyPI as the aussiehash package. You can however install it with pip:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/ozonejunkieau/humanhash.git

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.