Re: how to allow integer overflow for calculating hash code of a string?

On Sep 20, 2012, at 10:34 PM, Craig James <cjames(at)emolecules(dot)com> wrote:

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> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 1:55 AM, Haifeng Liu <liuhaifeng(at)live(dot)com> wrote:
> I want to write a hash function which acts as String.hashCode() in java: hash = hash * 31 + s.charAt(i)... but I got integer out of range error. How can I avoid this? I saw java do not care overflow of int, it just make the result negative.
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> Use the bitwise AND operator to mask the hash value with 0x3FFFFFF before each iteration:
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> hash = (hash & 67108863) * 31 + s.charAt(i);
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> Craig

Thank you, I believe your solution is OK for a hash function, but I am aiming to create a hash function that is consistent with the one applications use. I know postgresql 9.1 has a hash function called hashtext, but I don't know what algorithm it use, and I also see that it's not recommended to relay on it. So I am trying to create a hash function which behaves exactly the same as java.lang.String.hashCode(). The later one may generate negative hash value. I guess when the number is overflowing, the part out of range will be ignored, and if the highest bit get 1, the hash value turn to negative value.