hexdigest#

Finalise the context and return the digest as 32 lowercase hex chars.

Synopsis#

my $hex = $ctx->hexdigest;    # 32 chars, [0-9a-f]

What you get back#

A 32-character ASCII string containing only 0-9 and a-f. This is the form you want for ETags, md5sum-style checksum files, log output, and anywhere humans will read the digest. No 0x prefix, no separators, lowercase.

hexdigest is destructive: the context is reset to empty after the digest is produced. Clone first if you need to keep going.

Examples#

Common one-liner:

my $hex = Digest::MD5->new->add("hello")->hexdigest;

## 5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592

Digest the same context twice by cloning:

$ctx->add("stream so far");
my $checkpoint = $ctx->clone->hexdigest;
$ctx->add("more data");
my $final      = $ctx->hexdigest;

Build an md5sum-compatible line:

open(my $fh, '<:raw', $path) or die $!;
printf "%s  %s\n", Digest::MD5->new->addfile($fh)->hexdigest, $path;

Edge cases#

Empty context → d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (the MD5 of the empty string).
The result is always lowercase; if an external format demands uppercase, call uc on it.
Resets the context, so $ctx->hexdigest twice without intervening add calls gives the empty-string digest the second time.

Differences from upstream#

Fully compatible with upstream Digest::MD5 2.58.