Difference between hashing in Javascript and Python

Question

(there are a fair few fairly similar posts - I've read them, the solutions largely seem to be about Python string encoding, which I thought I had under control but clearly still don't)

I'm trying to port an NPM package to Python, but I can't get the same results from each script. I've stripped it down to this:

import sys
import hashlib
from binascii import hexlify
print("Python", sys.version)

test1 = "abcdefg".encode("utf-8")
print(hexlify(test1), hashlib.sha256(test1).hexdigest())
test2 = "abcdefg".encode("latin1")
print(hexlify(test2), hashlib.sha256(test2).hexdigest())
test3 = "abcdefg".encode("ascii")
print(hexlify(test3), hashlib.sha256(test3).hexdigest())
test4 = b"abcdefg"
print(hexlify(test4), hashlib.sha256(test4).hexdigest())
test5 = bytes([0x61, 0x62, 0x63, 0x64, 0x65, 0x66, 0x67])
print(hexlify(test5), hashlib.sha256(test5).hexdigest())

var js_sha3 = require('js-sha3')
var crypto = require('crypto');
var buffer = require('buffer');
console.log("Javascript:", process.version)

function toHex(str) {
  return new Buffer.from(str).toString('hex')
}

var test1 = "abcdefg"
console.log(toHex(test1).toString('hex'), js_sha3.sha3_256(test1))
var test2 = Buffer.from("abcdefg")
console.log(toHex(test2), js_sha3.sha3_256(test2))
var test3 = "abcdefg"
console.log(toHex(test3), crypto.createHash('sha3-256').update(test3).digest("hex"))
var test4 = Buffer.from("abcdefg")
console.log(toHex(test4), crypto.createHash('sha3-256').update(test4).digest("hex"))
var test5 = buffer.Buffer.from("abcdefg", 'hex')
console.log(toHex(test5), js_sha3.sha3_256(test5))

However, the output looks like this:

Python 3.7.4 (default, Sep  7 2019, 18:27:02) 
[Clang 10.0.1 (clang-1001.0.46.4)]
b'61626364656667' 7d1a54127b222502f5b79b5fb0803061152a44f92b37e23c6527baf665d4da9a
b'61626364656667' 7d1a54127b222502f5b79b5fb0803061152a44f92b37e23c6527baf665d4da9a
b'61626364656667' 7d1a54127b222502f5b79b5fb0803061152a44f92b37e23c6527baf665d4da9a
b'61626364656667' 7d1a54127b222502f5b79b5fb0803061152a44f92b37e23c6527baf665d4da9a
b'61626364656667' 7d1a54127b222502f5b79b5fb0803061152a44f92b37e23c6527baf665d4da9a
Javascript: v12.15.0
61626364656667 7d55114476dfc6a2fbeaa10e221a8d0f32fc8f2efb69a6e878f4633366917a62
61626364656667 7d55114476dfc6a2fbeaa10e221a8d0f32fc8f2efb69a6e878f4633366917a62
61626364656667 7d55114476dfc6a2fbeaa10e221a8d0f32fc8f2efb69a6e878f4633366917a62
61626364656667 7d55114476dfc6a2fbeaa10e221a8d0f32fc8f2efb69a6e878f4633366917a62
abcdef 8b8a2a6bc589cd378fc57f47d5668c58b31167b2bf9e632696e5c2d50fc16002

However, entering abcdefg into https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha256.html *(which is backed by js-sha3) returns 7d1a54....

So, my question is - how does my use of SHA-256 in Javascript and Python differ? What am I missing? (I'm not going to try and claim that one of the implementations is broken!)

[edit] If I use MD5 instead of SHA-256, the results match, adding further to the mystery!

x = bytes("thequickbrownfox", "utf-8")
print(hashlib.md5(x).hexdigest())
print(hashlib.sha256(x).hexdigest())

var x = "thequickbrownfox"
console.log(crypto.createHash('md5').update(x).digest("hex"))
console.log(crypto.createHash('sha3-256').update(x).digest("hex"))

outputs:

308fb76dc4d730360ee33932d2fb1056
bd484b82d7875e115c7273e9c6102ca4946b7c55fe905012be9152b87fe09568
308fb76dc4d730360ee33932d2fb1056
4822316e0d7a7a2ce1bb6489e57c73ca5db4c7c660c79c3c65839bd4aaf4ef10

Answer 1

Today I learned the very important difference between sha256 and sha3-256.