From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2008-02-07T10:11:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange characters... how are they created?

On Feb 6, 2008 6:22 PM, Daniel Waite <rabbitblue@gmail.com> wrote:
> Todd Benson wrote:
> > I don't know anything about bittorrent, but
> >
> > s = '20:Ÿø\îµÊ^Ω¬ ‡m$æÉ* ú0*'
> > puts s.unpack('h*')
> >
> > might point you in the right direction.
>
> That's an interesting operation, but nay, no directional change. (Also,
> pasting it into IRB causes my machine to beep and pause. Dunno why
> though. Perhaps the characters being pasted mean something special to
> Ruby?)

I think it has to do with your console.  It also doesn't work for me
when pasting into IRB, but seems to work when running with ruby from a
.rb file.

> I asked a friend of mine and he said that if you dump the output of the
> digest method directly to a file, you'll get the funky output.

I guess that makes sense.

> My guess is console does some kind of conversion -- possibly with
> character encoding?

I think so.

> Anywho, the following...
>
> require 'digest/sha1'
>
> output = File.open('output', 'w+')
> source = IO.read('./README_FOR_APP', 512)
> output << Digest::SHA1.digest(source)
> output.close
>
> Yields the same "style" output that Transmission generates.

But not the same?

From your original post with my code, I get...

2303a3f98fc5ee5bace5f4ca0278d6426e9ca202af03a2

...which if you leave off the first three bytes (20:) should be a
reasonable sha1 digest of 160 bits length.

Todd