Today, I wanted to use the Delphi Encryption Compendium(DEC) to hash a string. It is a little bit difficult to figure out how to use the components since they are poorly documented, but after a few minutes, I came up with this. At first, I tried to use the CalcBinary function, which allows you pass a string to it. It worked fine, but it is limited due to the fact that it would cast all input strings as an ansistring type. As a result, I switched to the CalcStream type to overcome this limitation. Here are two functions which you can use to calculate an MD5 hash for either a UnicodeString or AnsiString. These functions can be easily converted to a different hash type simply by changing the declaration and create type.

The available hash types are:
THash_MD2, THash_MD4, THash_MD5, THash_RipeMD128, THash_RipeMD160, THash_RipeMD256, THash_RipeMD320, THash_SHA, THash_SHA1, THash_SHA256, THash_SHA384, THash_SHA512, THash_Haval128, THash_Haval160, THash_Haval192, THash_Haval224, THash_Haval256, Thash_Tiger, THash_Panama, THash_Whirlpool, THash_Whirlpool1, THash_Square, THash_Snefru128, THash_Snefru256, and THash_Sapphire.

You can specify haval rounds like this: hash.rounds:=3; //(3,4,and 5 are valid round types.)

Uses DECHash, DECFmt;