There's nothing reckless about taking only part of an md5 hash. The MD5 algorithm is a good hashing algorithm and ensures that small changes to the source will result in big changes to the hash, so you don't have to worry about similar inputs producing similarities in the (first|last|middle) X bits. As for hoping there are no collisions, reducing the hash size does increase the chance of collision, but there's no guarantee that each full length md5 will be unique. It should be trivial to write code which checks for a collision and fixes it (by appending characters onto the input data until the md5 is unique, for example).
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|
