I am able to convert a oridnary string to a hash string using the
function md5(). how should i retrieve the original string.
You can't; it's a one-way hash. Very useful for storing passwords, computing message digests, and the like, but not for encrypting anything. You need to install the mcrypt support if you want to do that. I recently did it, and it's not too hard, but be forewarned there's only a single version of mcrypt that works with PHP. Just do a search here on phpbuilder.com for "mcrypt" and you'll find the message that contains all the info you need.
