You can wrap tqdm around the "permutations(TOKENS, k)" if you want to measure progress. I haven't spent time trying to make this particularly optimised, for ex

You can wrap tqdm around the "permutations(TOKENS, k)" if you want to measure progress. I haven't spent time trying to make this particularly optimised, for example that dict lookup is likely avoidable with a little bit of work via index lookup, and maybe cheaper. I've also not attempted to parallelise it, which would be fairly easy to do. #!/usr/bin/env python import string import hashlib from itertools import permutations WORD_DIGIT = { "one":1, "two":2, "three":3, "four":4, "five":5, "six":6, "seven":7, "eight":8, "nine":9} TOKENS = [ "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine", ] + list(string.ascii_lowercase) SEPARATOR = ", " STARTING_TEXT = "The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: " for k in range(2, 6): for perm in permutations(TOKENS, k): sha_start = "" for char in perm: if char in WORD_DIGIT: sha_start += str(WORD_DIGIT[char]) else: sha_start += char test_string = STARTING_TEXT + SEPARATOR.join(perm[:-1]) + ", and " + ''.join(perm[-1:]) + "\n" checksum = hashlib.new("sha256") checksum.update(test_string.encode()) if checksum.hexdigest().startswith(sha_start): print(test_string)