How to display the first few characters of a string in Python?

Question

Hi I just started learning Python but I'm sort of stuck right now.

I have hash.txt file containing thousands of malware hashes in MD5, Sha1 and Sha5 respectively separated by delimiters in each line. Below are 2 examples lines I extracted from the .txt file.

416d76b8811b0ddae2fdad8f4721ddbe|d4f656ee006e248f2f3a8a93a8aec5868788b927|12a5f648928f8e0b5376d2cc07de8e4cbf9f7ccbadb97d898373f85f0a75c47f 56a99a4205a4d6cab2dcae414a5670fd|612aeeeaa8aa432a7b96202847169ecae56b07ee|d17de7ca4c8f24ff49314f0f342dbe9243b10e9f3558c6193e2fd6bccb1be6d2

My intention is to display the first 32 characters (MD5 hash) so the output will look something like this:

416d76b8811b0ddae2fdad8f4721ddbe 56a99a4205a4d6cab2dcae414a5670fd

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can 'slice' a string very easily, just like you'd pull items from a list:

a_string = 'This is a string'

To get the first 4 letters:

first_four_letters = a_string[:4]
>>> 'This'

Or the last 5:

last_five_letters = a_string[-5:]
>>> 'string'

So applying that logic to your problem:

the_string = '416d76b8811b0ddae2fdad8f4721ddbe|d4f656ee006e248f2f3a8a93a8aec5868788b927|12a5f648928f8e0b5376d2cc07de8e4cbf9f7ccbadb97d898373f85f0a75c47f '
first_32_chars = the_string[:32]
>>> 416d76b8811b0ddae2fdad8f4721ddbe