Is there a way to generate a hash of a string so that the hash itself would be of specific length? I’ve got a function that generates 41-byte hashes (SHA-1), but I need it to be 33-bytes max (because of certain hardware limitations). If I truncate the 41-byte hash to 33, I’d probably (certainly!) lost the uniqueness.
Or actually I suppose an MD5 algorithm would fit nicely, if I could find some C code for one with your help.
EDIT: Thank you all for the quick and knowledgeable responses. I’ve chosen to go with an MD5 hash and it fits fine for my purpose. The uniqueness is an important issue, but I don’t expect the number of those hashes to be very large at any given time – these hashes represent software servers on a home LAN, so at max there would be 5, maybe 10 running.
The way hashes are calculated that’s unfortunately not possible. To limit the hash length to 33 bytes, you will have to cut it. You could xor the first and last 33 bytes, as that might keep more of the information. But even with 33 bytes you don’t have that big a chance of a collision.
md5: http://www.md5hashing.com/c++/
btw. md5 is 16 bytes, sha1 20 bytes and sha256 is 32 bytes, however as hexstrings, they all double in size. If you can store bytes, you can even use sha256.