Java String to SHA1

Question

I'm trying to make a simple String to SHA1 converter in Java and this is what I've got...

public static String toSHA1(byte[] convertme) {
    MessageDigest md = null;
    try {
        md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
    }
    catch(NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } 
    return new String(md.digest(convertme));
}

When I pass it toSHA1("password".getBytes()), I get [�a�ɹ??�%l�3~��. I know it's probably a simple encoding fix like UTF-8, but could someone tell me what I should do to get what I want which is 5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8? Or am I doing this completely wrong?

Answer 1

UPDATE
You can use Apache Commons Codec (version 1.7+) to do this job for you.

DigestUtils.sha1Hex(stringToConvertToSHexRepresentation)

Thanks to @Jon Onstott for this suggestion.

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Old Answer
Convert your Byte Array to Hex String. Real's How To tells you how.

return byteArrayToHexString(md.digest(convertme))

and (copied from Real's How To)

public static String byteArrayToHexString(byte[] b) {
  String result = "";
  for (int i=0; i < b.length; i++) {
    result +=
          Integer.toString( ( b[i] & 0xff ) + 0x100, 16).substring( 1 );
  }
  return result;
}

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BTW, you may get more compact representation using Base64. Apache Commons Codec API 1.4, has this nice utility to take away all the pain. refer here