I’ve not given this much thought yet, so I might turn out to be a silly question.
How can I take unique 5 ASCII character string and convert into a unique and reproducable (i.e needs to be the same every time) 32 bit integer?
Any ideas?
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I’ve not given this much thought yet, so I might turn out to be a silly question.
How can I take unique 5 ASCII character string and convert into a unique and reproducable (i.e needs to be the same every time) 32 bit integer?
Any ideas?
Assuming it is in fact ASCII (i.e., no characters with ordinal values greater than 127), you have five characters of 7 bits, or 35 bits of information. There is no way to generate a 32-bit code from 35 bits that is guaranteed to be unique; you’re missing three bits, so each code will also represent 7 other valid ASCII strings. However, you can make it very, very unlikely that you will ever see a collision by being careful in how you calculate the code so that input strings that are very similar have very different codes. I see another answer has suggested CRC-32. You could also use a hash function such as MD5 or SHA-1 and use only the first 32 bits; this is probably best because hash functions are specifically designed for this purpose.
If you can further constrain the values of the input string (say, only alphanumeric, no lowercase, no control characters, or something of the sort), you can probably eliminate that extra data and generate guaranteed unique 32-bit codes for each string.