how to create md5 hash of a column in R?

Package digest absolutely suitable for this task, so firstly we load it:

library(digest)

Then create/load/etc. test data.frame df:

txt <-
"ID,VID
1,xyz-0001
2,abc-0987"

df <- read.table(header=T, text=txt, sep=",", stringsAsFactors=F)
df

The initial data looks like:

  ID      VID
1  1 xyz-0001
2  2 abc-0987

Then we can use function digest with specified algorithm:

df$VID <- sapply(df$VID, digest, algo="md5")
df

Now we have hashed column VID in df:

  ID                              VID
1  1 44e3a9cf85f802ef50f18e64e01c5e32
2  2 c576ff180b2046c1a3ae939766588fd3

With an addition to redmode's answer:

library(digest)
txt <- "hello world"
hash <- digest(txt, algo="md5", serialize=F)
hash

[1] "5eb63bbbe01eeed093cb22bb8f5acdc3"

Setting serialize option to FALSE makes your results consistent with what you would get from online hash generators such as this or this.

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