A digest looks like an byte[16] of apparently random bytes, i.e. 128 bits, or a hex number 32 digits long. though they are completely repeatable. You need to armour it if you want to make it printable for transporting in an email, for example. The MD5 digests that you see in the manifest of a Netscape digitally signed jar file are base64 encoded.
MD5 is a trap-door, one-way function. You can easily compute the MD5 digest of a document, but you can’t go backwards and compose a document with a given digest. MD5 is not an encryption method.
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