How to create a md5 hash of a string in C?

To be honest, the comments accompanying the prototypes seem clear enough. Something like this should do the trick:

void compute_md5(char *str, unsigned char digest[16]) {
    MD5Context ctx;
    MD5Init(&ctx);
    MD5Update(&ctx, str, strlen(str));
    MD5Final(digest, &ctx);
}

where str is a C string you want the hash of, and digest is the resulting MD5 digest.

As other answers have mentioned, the following calls will compute the hash:

MD5Context md5;
MD5Init(&md5);
MD5Update(&md5, data, datalen);
MD5Final(digest, &md5);

The purpose of splitting it up into that many functions is to let you stream large datasets.

For example, if you're hashing a 10GB file and it doesn't fit into ram, here's how you would go about doing it. You would read the file in smaller chunks and call MD5Update on them.

MD5Context md5;
MD5Init(&md5);

fread(/* Read a block into data. */)
MD5Update(&md5, data, datalen);

fread(/* Read the next block into data. */)
MD5Update(&md5, data, datalen);

fread(/* Read the next block into data. */)
MD5Update(&md5, data, datalen);

...

//  Now finish to get the final hash value.
MD5Final(digest, &md5);

Here's a complete example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#if defined(__APPLE__)
#  define COMMON_DIGEST_FOR_OPENSSL
#  include <CommonCrypto/CommonDigest.h>
#  define SHA1 CC_SHA1
#else
#  include <openssl/md5.h>
#endif

char *str2md5(const char *str, int length) {
    int n;
    MD5_CTX c;
    unsigned char digest[16];
    char *out = (char*)malloc(33);

    MD5_Init(&c);

    while (length > 0) {
        if (length > 512) {
            MD5_Update(&c, str, 512);
        } else {
            MD5_Update(&c, str, length);
        }
        length -= 512;
        str += 512;
    }

    MD5_Final(digest, &c);

    for (n = 0; n < 16; ++n) {
        snprintf(&(out[n*2]), 16*2, "%02x", (unsigned int)digest[n]);
    }

    return out;
}

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        char *output = str2md5("hello", strlen("hello"));
        printf("%s\n", output);
        free(output);
        return 0;
    }

I don't know this particular library, but I've used very similar calls. So this is my best guess:

unsigned char digest[16];
const char* string = "Hello World";
struct MD5Context context;
MD5Init(&context);
MD5Update(&context, string, strlen(string));
MD5Final(digest, &context);

This will give you back an integer representation of the hash. You can then turn this into a hex representation if you want to pass it around as a string.

char md5string[33];
for(int i = 0; i < 16; ++i)
    sprintf(&md5string[i*2], "%02x", (unsigned int)digest[i]);