How can I calculate the MD5 message digest of a Unicode string in Perl 5.8? The MD5 hash algorithm naturally expects a sequence of bytes as its input, and I have a string with a sequence of characters. I tried
$ perl -e 'use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex); print md5_hex("\x{20ac}");' Wide character in subroutine entry at -e line 1. but it seems that I have to explicitely convert my character string to a byte sequence first. How can I do this most efficently (keeping in mind, that it ought to be a NOP internally as the string is already stored in UTF-8)? Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>