Compare lists by hash

This script allows to count how many entries are shared between two lists without having to share the lists themselves by hashing the list entries and comparing the hashes only. For each entry, spaces and line breaks around the entry get trimmed away and the string is converted to lower cases, so strings that only differ in casing will be identified as matches. Empty lines are ignored.

Installation

Run npm link in this directory to install the scripts.

Deinstallation

Run npm unlink in this directory to uninstall the scripts.

Share a list of hashes

Then create a text file where each line is an entry to the list and hash it via

hash-file name-of-your-input-file.txt name-for-the-output-file.txt

Share the output file with the person that will do the counting.

Count hash hits

If someone gave you a list of hashes to compare, first create your own list that you want to compare the hashes with. If you have both files, let's call them hashes.txt and yourOwnList.txt, then you can run

count-hash-hits yourOwnList.txt hashes.txt

The script will give you the number of hits.

Examples

The hashes example file was created from the example list by running

hash-file ./examples/list.txt ./examples/hashes.txt

in this directory. Running

count-hash-hits ./examples/list.txt ./examples/hashes.txt

therefore will give you 2, the number of entries in the list, as all list entries will match.