Just for debugging purposes I would like to map a big string (a session_id, which is difficult to visualize) to a, let's say, 6 character "hash". This hash does not need to be secure in any way, just cheap to compute, and of fixed and reduced length (md5 is too long). The input string can have any length.
How would you implement this "cheap_hash" in python so that it is not expensive to compute? It should generate something like this:
def compute_cheap_hash(txt, length=6):
# do some computation
return cheap_hash
print compute_cheap_hash("SDFSGSADSADFSasdfgsadfSDASAFSAGAsaDSFSA2345435adfdasgsaed")
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