Update: My changes have been accepted to corelib. Please download the official release.

Recently, I worked on a project that required me to use the SHA1 class from Adobe’s open source corelib for ActionScript 3. Unfortunately, the currently available class can only create a hash for string data. That’s cool, but limiting. With some surprisingly simple tweaks, I updated the class to work with raw ByteArray data. Now, we’re talking cool, and infinitely more useful!

//a simple string to hash with the original functionality
var message:String = "The quick red dog jumped over the lazy fox.";

trace(SHA1.hash(message));
//output: 8aa9f4a49d457eb847cb1a2e4f67a4113cdb8bdf

//write the same string to a ByteArray
var rawMessage:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
rawMessage.writeUTFBytes(message);

trace(SHA1.hashBytes(rawMessage));
//output: 8aa9f4a49d457eb847cb1a2e4f67a4113cdb8bdf (it's the same!)

If you haven’t heard, Mike Chambers arecently announced the release of Adobe’s open source ActionScript 3 libraries on Google Code. They’re hoping that this will help encourage more involvement from the developer community. I talked to Mike a while ago about my enhancements, and I’m hoping to get them integrated soon. For now, I wanted to get these changes in people’s hands. You can download the updated code here and use it under the same license terms as the original version.