Home › Forums › kdb+ › md5 – getting the original string back. › Re: md5 – getting the original string back.
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It would be helpful if you could describe your use case.
MD5 is a hash function. The main characteristic of a hash function is that it reduces the amount of information contained in the input. There is no way to get back the exact original data as there are infinitely many possible byte sequences that lead to the same hash. Usually when you want to use the hash for anything, it’s for comparing against another hash to check if the two are equal (an example is downloading a file, where you can check if your download is corrupted by comparing its hash to the one found on the website).