Creating MD5 Digest in Groovy (or Java)

There is a quick-and-dirty way to generate MD5 digests in Groovy (or Java):

import java.security.MessageDigest

MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5")

digest.update("encodeMe".bytes)

BigInteger big = new BigInteger(1,digest.digest())
String     md5 = big.toString(16).padLeft(32,"0")

The above encodes the candidate string "encodeMe" to an MD5 digest.

If there are any Grails users reading, please note that you can simply use one of the built-in codecs:

 String md5 = "encodeMe".encodeAsMD5()

Hopefully this will be if use to someone.