How to do it...

In the following steps, we will see how to obtain the hash of a file:

1. Begin by importing the libraries and selecting the desired file you wish to hash:

import sys
import hashlib

filename = "python-3.7.2-amd64.exe"

1. Instantiate the MD5 and SHA256 objects, and specify the size of the chunks we will be reading:

BUF_SIZE = 65536
md5 = hashlib.md5()
sha256 = hashlib.sha256()

1. We then read in the file in chunks of 64 KB and incrementally construct our hashes:

with open(filename, "rb") as f:
    while True:
        data = f.read(BUF_SIZE)
        if not data:
            break
        md5.update(data)
        sha256.update(data)

1. Finally, print out the resulting hashes:

print("MD5: {0}".format(md5.hexdigest()))
print("SHA256: {0}".format(sha256.hexdigest()))

This results in the following output:

MD5: ff258093f0b3953c886192dec9f52763
SHA256: 0fe2a696f5a3e481fed795ef6896ed99157bcef273ef3c4a96f2905cbdb3aa13