digest: Compact hash representations of arbitrary R objects
Compact hash representations of arbitrary R objects
Overview
The digest package provides a principal function digest() for the creation
of hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, crc32,
xxhash, murmurhash, spookyhash, blake3, and crc32c algorithms) permitting
easy comparison of R language objects.
Extensive documentation is available at the package documentation site.
Examples
As R can serialize any object, we can run digest() on any object:
R> library(digest)
R> digest(trees)
[1] "12412cbfa6629c5c80029209b2717f08"
R> digest(lm(log(Height) ~ log(Girth), data=trees))
[1] "e25b62de327d079b3ccb98f3e96987b1"
R> digest(summary(lm(log(Height) ~ log(Girth), data=trees)))
[1] "86c8c979ee41a09006949e2ad95feb41"
R>By using the hash sum, which is very likely to be unique, to identify an underlying object or calculation, one can easily implement caching strategies. This is a common use of the digest package.
Other Functions
A small number of additional functions is available:
sha1()for numerally stable hashsums,hmac()for hashed message authentication codes based on a key,AES()for Advanced Encryption Standard block ciphers.
Note
Please note that this package is not meant to be deployed for cryptographic purposes. More comprehensive and widely tested libraries such as OpenSSL should be used instead.
Installation
The package is on CRAN and can be installed via a standard
install.packages("digest")Continued Testing
As we rely on the tinytest package, the already-installed package can also be verified via
tinytest::test_package("digest")at any later point.
Author
Dirk Eddelbuettel, with contributions by Antoine Lucas, Jarek Tuszynski, Henrik Bengtsson, Simon Urbanek, Mario Frasca, Bryan Lewis, Murray Stokely, Hannes Muehleisen, Duncan Murdoch, Jim Hester, Wush Wu, Qiang Kou, Thierry Onkelinx, Michel Lang, Viliam Simko, Kurt Hornik, Radford Neal, Kendon Bell, Matthew de Queljoe, Ion Suruceanu, Bill Denney, Dirk Schumacher, Winston Chang, and Dean Attali.
License
GPL (>= 2)