How do I calculate CRC32 of a string

Question

How do I calculate the CRC32 (Cyclic Redundancy Checksum) of a string in .NET?

Answer 1

This guy seems to have your answer.

https://damieng.com/blog/2006/08/08/calculating_crc32_in_c_and_net

And in case the blog ever goes away or breaks the url, here's the github link:

https://github.com/damieng/DamienGKit/blob/master/CSharp/DamienG.Library/Security/Cryptography/Crc32.cs

---

Usage of the Crc32 class from the blog post:

Crc32 crc32 = new Crc32();
String hash = String.Empty;

using (FileStream fs = File.Open("c:\\myfile.txt", FileMode.Open))
  foreach (byte b in crc32.ComputeHash(fs)) hash += b.ToString("x2").ToLower();

Console.WriteLine("CRC-32 is {0}", hash);

Answer 2

Since you seem to be looking to calculate the CRC32 of a string (rather than a file) there's a good example here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/CRC-32#C.23

The code should it ever disappear:

/// <summary>
/// Performs 32-bit reversed cyclic redundancy checks.
/// </summary>
public class Crc32
{
    #region Constants
    /// <summary>
    /// Generator polynomial (modulo 2) for the reversed CRC32 algorithm. 
    /// </summary>
    private const UInt32 s_generator = 0xEDB88320;
    #endregion

    #region Constructors
    /// <summary>
    /// Creates a new instance of the Crc32 class.
    /// </summary>
    public Crc32()
    {
        // Constructs the checksum lookup table. Used to optimize the checksum.
        m_checksumTable = Enumerable.Range(0, 256).Select(i =>
        {
            var tableEntry = (uint)i;
            for (var j = 0; j < 8; ++j)
            {
                tableEntry = ((tableEntry & 1) != 0)
                    ? (s_generator ^ (tableEntry >> 1)) 
                    : (tableEntry >> 1);
            }
            return tableEntry;
        }).ToArray();
    }
    #endregion

    #region Methods
    /// <summary>
    /// Calculates the checksum of the byte stream.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="byteStream">The byte stream to calculate the checksum for.</param>
    /// <returns>A 32-bit reversed checksum.</returns>
    public UInt32 Get<T>(IEnumerable<T> byteStream)
    {
        try
        {
            // Initialize checksumRegister to 0xFFFFFFFF and calculate the checksum.
            return ~byteStream.Aggregate(0xFFFFFFFF, (checksumRegister, currentByte) => 
                      (m_checksumTable[(checksumRegister & 0xFF) ^ Convert.ToByte(currentByte)] ^ (checksumRegister >> 8)));
        }
        catch (FormatException e)
        {
            throw new CrcException("Could not read the stream out as bytes.", e);
        }
        catch (InvalidCastException e)
        {
            throw new CrcException("Could not read the stream out as bytes.", e);
        }
        catch (OverflowException e)
        {
            throw new CrcException("Could not read the stream out as bytes.", e);
        }
    }
    #endregion

    #region Fields
    /// <summary>
    /// Contains a cache of calculated checksum chunks.
    /// </summary>
    private readonly UInt32[] m_checksumTable;

    #endregion
}

and to use it:

var arrayOfBytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog");

var crc32 = new Crc32();
Console.WriteLine(crc32.Get(arrayOfBytes).ToString("X"));

You can test the input / output values here: https://crccalc.com/