The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

2.34. Calculating a 32-Bit CRC

The Cyclic Redundancy Checksum (CRC) is a well-known way of obtaining a “signature” for a file or other collection of bytes. The CRC has the property that the chance of data being changed and keeping the same CRC is 1 in 2**N, where N is the number of bits in the result (most often 32 bits).

The zlib library, created by Ueno Katsuhiro, enables you to do this.

The method crc32 computes a CRC given a string as a parameter:

require 'zlib'
include Zlib
crc = crc32("Hello")             # 4157704578
crc = crc32(" world!",crc)       # 461707669
crc = crc32("Hello world!")      # 461707669 (same as above)

A previous CRC can be specified as an optional second parameter; the result will be as if the strings were concatenated and a single CRC was ...