Question

I’d like to convert an arbitrary string (or for easier process a string hash) to a float number between 0 and 1. The purpose is to create a function that returns a color code for a given string so the user always sees that entity in the same color that is generated from its name.

OP included this code in comments (included here for readability):

var hashed:String = MD5.hash(input); // creates a 32 long hexa 
const max:Number = Number("0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"); 
var hashedHexa:Number = Number("0x" + hashed); 
return hashedHexa/max;

Answer 1

Since you’re asking us to create an algorithm; there are many ways to do so. I might try something with the charCodeAt method. Conceptually something like this:

public function stringToDecimal(value:String):Number{
 var results : Number = 0;
 // loop over each character in string
 for(var index:int = 0;index< value.length; index++){
   // this code turns each character in the string to a number and adds them all together
   // divide by 100 b/c we know all ASCII charcodes will be between 0 & 127. This will give 
   // a decimal result
   results += (value.charCodeAt(index)/100);
 }
 return results
}

This algorithm will not guarantee that every string will return a unique number; but that wasn’t one of your requirements.