Hi, folks!
I’m happy to announce the first public release of our Taobao.com
ngx_set_misc module, v0.14.
ngx_set_misc is an nginx module that extends the standard ngx_rewrite
module’s “set” directive to support various advanced functionalities
like MD5, SHA1, json/mysql/postgresql string literal quoting, URI
escaping/unescaping, default variable value assignment, upstream
hashing based on a custom key, base32 encoding/decoding, and more 
Please see the project homepage for more details:
http://github.com/agentzh/set-misc-nginx-module
And the release tarball can be downloaded from
http://github.com/agentzh/set-misc-nginx-module/tarball/v0.14
Various (funny) use cases can be found in my “nginx.conf scripting”
talk’s slides:
http://agentzh.org/misc/slides/nginx-conf-scripting/ (use the
arrow keys on your keyboard to switch pages)
I must thank my colleagues shrimp and calio for their work on
polishing this module in the last few months.
This module won’t be possible if Marcus C. does not publish his
crazy Nginx Development Kit (NDK) project:
http://github.com/simpl-it/ngx_devel_kit
And it’s a prerequisite for this module
I know that this module has a really terrible name, but it’s been
there for months already 
We’ve been using it extensively in our products of Taobao.com. And
Qunar.com is also using it heavily in their production environment.
Enjoy!
-agentzh