Category: Web development

The goal of this page is to put two MD5 code samples on the same web page, one for ASP classic and one for ASP.NET. String formatting (like ASCII vs UTF-8) can trip up coding these two routines. These two code samples will produce the same MD5 hash output.

Classic ASP/VBScript MD5

The ASP code is simple once you have a copy of md5.asp from http://frez.co.uk. The only file in the ZIP that you need is md5.asp.


<!--#include file="md5.asp"-->
<% response.write md5("[email protected]") %>


ASP.NET MD5

The keys to getting the .net output to match are encoding.ascii and toString("x2").

<%@ Import Namespace="System.Security.Cryptography" %>   
<script language="VB" runat="server">

	Public Sub Page_Load( sender As Object, e As EventArgs )

		Dim strPlainText as String = "[email protected]"
  		
		dim md5Hasher as MD5 = MD5.create( )
		
		dim result as byte( ) = md5Hasher.computeHash( encoding.ascii.getBytes( strPlainText))
		
		for each singleByte as byte in result
			response.write ( singleByte.ToString("x2") )
		next
		
	End Sub

</script>

Today, I needed to convert a time stamp like “1/25/2011 10:42:11 AM” to a readable sentence format like “2 months and 6 hours ago.” Here’s the code I came up with:

	function timeAgo( byval time )
		sentence = ""
		hits = 0
		piecesAgo = array( 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 )
		piecesTotals = array( 0, 12, 30, 24, 60, 60 )
		labels = array( "year", "month", "day", "hour", "minute", "second" )
		dateAddSymbols = array( "yyyy", "m", "d", "h", "n", "s" )

		for p=0 to uBound( piecesAgo )
			piecesAgo( p ) = 0 + datediff( dateAddSymbols( p ), time, now( ))

			if piecesAgo( p ) <> 0 then
				time = dateAdd( dateAddSymbols( p ), piecesAgo( p ), time )
			end if
		next

		'remove negative values
		for p=uBound( piecesAgo ) to 0 step -1
			if piecesAgo( p ) < 0 and p > 0 then
				piecesAgo( p ) = piecesAgo( p ) + piecesTotals( p )
				piecesAgo( p-1 ) = piecesAgo( p-1 ) - 1
			end if
		next

		for p=0 to uBound( piecesAgo )
			if piecesAgo( p ) <> 0 then

				if len( sentence ) > 0 then
					sentence = sentence & " and "
				end if
				sentence = sentence & piecesAgo( p ) & " " & labels( p )
				if piecesAgo( p ) > 1 then
					sentence = sentence & "s"
				end if
				hits = hits + 1
				if hits >= 2 then
					exit for
				end if
			end if
		next

		set piecesAgo = nothing
		set piecesTotals = nothing
		set labels = nothing
		set dateAddSymbols = nothing

		timeAgo = sentence & " ago"
	end function