In order to be able to detect RT of a particular tweet, I plan to store hashes of each formatted tweet in the database.
What hashing algorithm should I use. Cryptic is of course not essential. Just a minimal way of storing a data as something which can then be compared if it is the same, in an efficient way.
My first attempt at this was by using md5 hashes. But I figured there can be hashing algorithms that are much more efficient, as security is not required.
You are trying to hash a string right? Builtin types can be hashed right away, just do hash("some string") and you get some int. Its the same function python uses for dictonarys, so it is probably the best choice.
Detecting Retweets using computationally inexpensive Python hashing algorithms