Question

This seems like a fairly simple problem, but the solution is eluding me:

If I have the following two strings:

string str1 = "Ping";
string str2 = "Pong";

I’m needing an algorithm to create a unique value for the two strings, no matter what order they are in. For example:

UniqueValue(str1, str2) and UniqueValue(str2, str1) should return the exact same value.

EDIT: UniqueValue returns a string. I understand it won’t be “truly” unique, but a hash-like value will work.

Thanks,
Tyler

Answer 1

Sort the strings.

Convert / to // and ; to /; in each of the strings.

Concatenate the strings, putting a ; between each.