Hashing a dictionary?

python hash dictionary
ThiefMaster picture ThiefMaster · May 4, 2011 · Viewed 106.4k times · Source

For caching purposes I need to generate a cache key from GET arguments which are present in a dict.

Currently I'm using sha1(repr(sorted(my_dict.items()))) (sha1() is a convenience method that uses hashlib internally) but I'm curious if there's a better way.

Answer

Jack O'Connor picture Jack O'Connor · Feb 25, 2014

Using sorted(d.items()) isn't enough to get us a stable repr. Some of the values in d could be dictionaries too, and their keys will still come out in an arbitrary order. As long as all the keys are strings, I prefer to use:

json.dumps(d, sort_keys=True)

That said, if the hashes need to be stable across different machines or Python versions, I'm not certain that this is bulletproof. You might want to add the separators and ensure_ascii arguments to protect yourself from any changes to the defaults there. I'd appreciate comments.

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