Re: From HWaddress to long

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:28:40 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<8374b354-80dc-4cb8-adb3-61e14dcaa1a4@m7g2000vbn.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 17, 2:09 pm, "Kevin P. Fleming" <n...@kpfleming.us> wrote:

On 01/17/2011 07:45 AM, Andrea Crotti wrote:

Andrea Crotti<andrea.crott...@gmail.com> writes:

In short I need an hash function that gives me a long from
an hardware address.

What could be an easy solution that still gives me a good
distribution?

From
"FF2212A.."
I thought I could simply do

(((16 * 16) % LONG_MAX) * 2) % LONG_MAX...

But probably it's a stupid idea.
A mac address is basically 24bytes, and a long is maybe max 8 bytes, so
of course I have to do something to squeeze it...


Of course something already done would be also good.
A generic string hash I'm not sure, since my strings only uses 16
possible characters.

(for example I found this
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/std/locale/collate/hash/)
But I guess an md5/sha would be also fine, right?


A MAC address is 6 bytes (48 bits). It will fit in a 64-bit
unsigned integer (which might be a 'long' on some platforms
and not on others) just fine.


And it's guaranteed to fit in a long long. Depending on table
size and how MAC addresses are allocated, however, it's possible
that converting the MAC address to size_t might not result in
a very good hash. If that's the case, using a good string hash
over the six bytes could reduce collisions significantly.

--
James Kanze

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