Converting a string to a natural number.
So I'm writing this simple hash for my LJ client, and I find myself needing to convert hash keys into numbers (so that I can go on to hash them). I orignally was going to convert it into a radix-128 integer, but then I realized that would get out of hand for strings bigger than about 10 characters. I ended up going with something like this:
Does anybody have any suggestions on a better way to do this (this way is likely to cause collisions).
long convertkey(char *key) { //takes string and converts to int for hashing
int i, j, n, s;
long ret;
n = strlen(key);
s = n > 56 ? n % 56 : 1; //we want to make sure this'll fit into a 64 bit int
//figure out a better way to do this...
for(i=0, j=0; i < n; i += s, j++) {
ret += key[i] << j;
}
return ret;
}
Does anybody have any suggestions on a better way to do this (this way is likely to cause collisions).
