SHA256 does not give expected result

Question

I am following the tutorial on this site: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses#How_to_create_Bitcoin_Address

In part 2 it shows that the SHA256 yields a result different than what I get when I am running my python code:

the string is: 0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6

While the tutorial SHA256 comes to: 600FFE422B4E00731A59557A5CCA46CC183944191006324A447BDB2D98D4B408

My short python shows:

sha_result = sha256(bitconin_addresss).hexdigest().upper()

print sha_result


32511E82D56DCEA68EB774094E25BAB0F8BDD9BC1ECA1CEEDA38C7A43ACEDDCE

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You're hashing the string when you're supposed to be hashing the bytes represented by that string.

>>> hashlib.sha256('0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6'.decode('hex')).hexdigest().upper()

'600FFE422B4E00731A59557A5CCA46CC183944191006324A447BDB2D98D4B408'

Comments

How did you know that it was a string and not the bytes? I am asking because I couldn’t tell the difference.

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It's a string of hexadecimal digits, so I figure it had to represent a bytestring.